“Zingers crisscross these pages like tracer fire. . . . [Tina Brown] becomes the ideal tour guide: witty, opinionated and adept at moving us smoothly from bedchamber to belowstairs while offering side trips to the cesspits of the tabloid press, the striving world of second-tier celebrities and the threadbare lodgings of palace supernumeraries.”
—The Wall Street Journal“[Tina Brown] deploys her sterling contacts and deeply embedded sources, her familiarity with British royal history and her personal encounters with royals, palace courtiers, politicians and journalists to serve up a luscious feast of . . . well, yes, gossip. But what elegant gossip, dressed up in Brown’s stylish sentences and erudite insights.”
—USA Today“Juicy, satisfying entertainment.”
—Town & Country“Gripping . . . [The] real power of this book is the cumulative picture it builds of lives as they have to be lived by the rules and customs of the Windsor palaces.”
—The Daily Beast“Brown is a deft and wily royal chronicler, marshaling a heavy arsenal of details into a wickedly edible narrative. Her cynical eye and free, indirect style sustain and synthesize a range of viewpoints, and she’s retained the editor’s knack for devastating capsule descriptions. . . . An excellent primer for the unpredictable years ahead.”
—Los Angeles Times“Clever, well-informed and disgustingly entertaining.”
—The Times (UK)“A motherlode of delectable royal gossip . . . Brown has produced a work both scholarly and scandalous that makes us think about what the post-Elizabethan world may bring, alternately amusing and horrifying us along the way. . . . Vivid and richly embroidered.”
—The Independent (UK)“A compulsive read . . . Brown’s turn of phrase—honed by decades at the helm of
Tatler, Vanity Fair and
The New Yorker—is the stuff of
The Queen and
The Crown creator Peter Morgan’s scriptwriting dreams.”
—The Telegraph (UK)“The devil is in the delicious detail. . . . Brown tackles her subjects with the same brio she brought to her years as a highly regarded magazine editor. . . . Her access to those who flit around the royals gives her writing an edgy authenticity.”
—Daily Mail“Brown thrashes her way through absolutely everything that has happened to the family since the end of the last book in 1997. . . . Charles and Camilla are vividly brought to life in a series of well-researched stories and anecdotes.”
—The Sunday Times (UK)“It’s hard to look away as Tina Brown delves into decades’ worth of royal scandals.”
—The Guardian (UK)
