Tag: royal biography

historical, non-fiction, series

Non-fiction series: Penguin Monarchs

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A slightly unconventional series post today because a) because it’s non-fiction and b) each book has a different author but bear with me because I have things to say about them.

Penguin Monarchs are a series of 44 short biographies of British Monarchs intended to be digestible introductions to the lives of the ruler in question. All the ones that I have read are around 100 pages excluding bibliographies and illustrations – which takes them to around 120 pages all in. The first batch came out in hardback in 2014 – I know it was hardback because I went to an event in Westminster talking about one of them to march the release – but are now out in slim and quite stylish paperbacks that are very easy to get hold of in the shops.

Each is written by a different author, many of whom (particularly in the early days) are names you may recognise from writing popular history or biographies that you might spot in the bookshops – for example John Guy wrote Henry VIII, Philip Ziegler did George VI, Helen Castor did Elizabeth I and David Cannadine did George V. Others are written by renowned historians who hold prestigious jobs in academia who you might only have heard of if you are reading academic history books or journals.

At this point I have read eight of the series, covering both monarchs whose reign I am familiar with and those who I am less au fait on. And if you’re wondering the stuff that I’m less good on is basically everything before the early modern era. When I studied history at university my department had split history into five periods and you had to do a variety of different periods. I made strenuous efforts to stick to period 3 onwards – which meant that managed to stick to modules from the 12th century onwards and helped by the fact that I was doing French as well and had to do my dissertation on French history, to mostly be post 1700. And my historical reading these days mostly sticks to The Wars of the Roses onwards. So when I read the books on Edward the Confessor, William I and Richard I, I was substantially out of my comfort zone in terms of background knowledge.

What I do really like about all of them is that they have great bibliographies and further reading lists at the back – so if you want to go and read more on a particular aspect of the story you can or if you want to see how much of the research material that you have already read that’s also an option. It also usually comes with a commentary about what to watch out for while reading it which I appreciate too especially if they come with a side of historian snark. For example in Piers Brendon’s further reading to Edward VIII you have “Michael Bloch was [also] a clear partisan of the Windsors but his volumes contain rich deposits of original material” and “William Shawcross’s official life of Edward’s sister-in-law, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (London: Macmillan, 2009) is extremely long and full of inside information. But it omits almost everything to its subject’s discredit, succumbing to the prevailing weakness of royal historical biographies – retrospective sycophancy.” Burn!

And so to my conclusions: for the monarchs that I was knowledgable about, I found them interesting summations of the lives and reigns and I enjoyed seeing which threads of the monarch’s life they thought were important enough to explore in the limited amount of space they have. For the monarchs that I wasn’t as familiar with it was a different experience because for one or two certainly I didn’t think the narrative of the events of the life was clear enough for the casual reader (if you can call me casual) but that comes with the proviso that history pre 1200 is really hard because it’s so dependent on chronicles – some of which are not contemporaneous – and interpreting what their biases might be and what is real and what’s not. All of which is to say that it can be complicated guesswork on an era and a mindset that are incredibly different to anything we are familiar with now.

Have a great weekend!

Book of the Week, new releases, non-fiction

Book of the Week: Entitled

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I mean, I’d be shocked if any of you are surprised by today’s pick if you saw yesterday’s reading list, because I am somewhat predictable BUT this really lived up to the hype and is worth reading.

Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York is a joint biography of Prince Andrew, Duke of York and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson. It’s written by Andrew Lownie, whose previous book was The Traitor King (which I also read on a holiday!) but has also written about The Mountbattens and Guy Burges. Lownie says in the introduction that he asked the Duke and Duchess to participate in the book – who then tried to prevent the book from happening. He says he approached more than three thousand people as part of the process of writing this book, of whom only around a tenth responded. All of which is to say that he wants you to know that he’s really tried to get the whole picture about the couple. It’s a joint biography but it’s also a look at the way that the couple remain incredibly intertwined nearly 20 years after their divorce. Andrew of course was forced to retire from public life after his disastrous Newsnight interview in 2019, where he tried (and failed) to answer questions about his relationship with the paedophile former financier Jeffry Epstein.

Now you may have seen the headlines generated first by the serialisation ahead of publication, and then the think pieces afterwards about what it means for the future of the couple. Or of course the headlines this week when Sarah Ferguson was dropped by a series of charities after an email from her to Epstein emerged from after the time when she said she had cut all contact with him. And you may think that given all that, what is the point of reading the book, surely all the best bits are already out there.

Well. Yes, the biggest revelations are already out there, but I think reading the book really brings home the scale and volume of it all. And although a lot of the focus of scandal in recent years has been on him (and indeed the serialisation headlines), her behaviour is worth reading about too – according to this she’s a charming people person and great sales person, locked in a cycle of spending, debt and then grift and deals to try and bring it round to a point where she then repeats the pattern.

In The Traitor King, Lownie made a persuasive case that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were active and willing participants in the Nazi intrigues that surrounded them as part of a concerted effort to benefit themselves and improve their positions and I think it changed significantly the way that the couple are viewed. This isn’t changing the way that the Duke of York is perceived – it’s putting all the pieces together and adding in the background information to really cement the idea that he’s up to his neck in scandals around sex and money. And between the two of them – in Lownie’s telling – they present a big challenge for the British monarchy to deal with at a time when there are less and less “working” Royals and also perhaps less public fondness for the institution as a whole.

I bought my copy of Entitled at the airport but you should be able to get this basically everywhere – as long as they haven’t run out of copies. And at Birmingham last week, they only had copies in one of the bookshops (and as I said on Saturday I didn’t manage to get it in any of my pictures!) and not many of them. But I’ve seen it in any bookshop of any size that I’ve been into since early August, and it’s obviously in Kindle and Kobo and audiobook too – although those e-versions have already had a edit, which is a good reminder to us all that ebook files are changeable, and your hard copies are not – once you’ve bought the original version I mean.

Happy Reading!