Entitled: The Rise And Fall Of The House Of York by Andrew Lownie
Meticulously sourced and cool in tone, Entitled reads less like gossip and more like a case study in institutional vulnerability. Best known for his forensic approach to contested royal reputations, Lownie draws on years of research, interviews and investigation to examine how privilege, entitlement and public duty collided spectacularly where the former Duke and Duchess of York were concerned. If you didn’t catch this one when it came out last year, it is vital that you do now.
Unruly: A History Of England’s Kings And Queens by David Mitchell
Better known for satire than scholarship, Mitchell applies a sharp, sceptical intelligence to the myths that have grown up around the Crown. Ranging from the Anglo-Saxon kings to the Tudors, he delights in puncturing reverence and exposing incompetence, vanity and sheer absurdity. His message is clear: monarchy has always been precarious and improvised. The book reminds us that crisis and chaos are not aberrations in royal history, they are its default setting.
The Crown In Crisis: Countdown To The Abdication by Alexander Larman
Larman is an infinitely readable author, journalist and historian, whose other subjects include the Earl of Rochester and Lord Byron. Having immersed himself in archives and previously unseen sources, he has produced a book about Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson that is packed full of detail and intrigue. Even if you know the story before you pick up The Crown in Crisis, elements of its fresh take will stay with you long after you put it down.
The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown
It may well be time to dust off Brown’s 2007 book about Diana, Princess of Wales. Veteran journalist Tina Brown spoke to over 250 people to put together this masterful, glamorous and ultimately sad portrait. A New York Times bestseller, it is brimming with Brown’s invaluable social observation. The Sunday Times said: “Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles is not a book on Diana. It is the book.”
White King: The Tragedy Of Charles I by Leanda De Lisle
Here, historian Leanda de Lisle turns her attention to one of the monarchy’s most catastrophic failures: the reign of Charles I. With her gift for narrative clarity, de Lisle strips away centuries of polemic to present the king neither as a saint nor as a simple tyrant, but as a man whose certainties proved fatally unsuited to the age he inhabited. The result is a lucid and often moving assessment of a sovereign who lost his throne and his head – and whose downfall remains one of the gravest crises the British monarchy has ever faced.
Young Prince Philip: His Turbulent Early Life by Philip Eade
This is a gripping account of the formative years of the man who would become the Queen Elizabeth II’s “strength and stay”. Eade pieces together a childhood marked by exile, a fractured family and relentless displacement. The book is elegantly written and often quietly poignant, reminding us that long before the gaffes and the public role, there was a stateless adolescent navigating dynastic collapse.
