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“... years, less six weeks, after his great-grandmother Victoria succeeded to the throne. At 18 the new queen had been full of confidence. Her first action was to move her bed out of her mother’s room and have Sir John Conroy, her mother’s intimate ...”

“... whether any other editor in the country would have touched the thing. Altrincham called the Queen ‘a pain in the neck’, ridiculed her fatuous ‘my husband and I’ locution, and alleged that she was the mindless mouthpiece of a set of court nonentities ‘of the tweedy sort’. He concluded: ‘The personality ...”

“... applied, in reality, at least as much to George VI as to Edward. As Duchess of York and later as Queen, Elizabeth lent ‘Bertie’ strength and boosted his self-confidence (whereas Wallis only made Edward more feebly dependent on herself). Yet he showed considerable strength and will-power of his own in determining to ...”

“... When Lytton Strachey looked back at the ‘apotheosis’ of Queen Victoria’s final years in his biography of 1921, he could only wonder at the disparity between the ‘dazzled imagination of her subjects’ and the unimaginative woman who had somehow inspired them. While ‘Victoria soared aloft towards the regions of divinity through a nimbus of purest glory,’ as Strachey put it, no one appeared to realise how inadequate she was to her symbolic task: That the nation’s idol was a very incomplete representative of the nation was a circumstance that was hardly noticed, and yet it was conspicuously true ...”

“... crown. It is the most cogent testimony to Prince Albert’s consortship from his marriage to Queen Victoria in 1840 to his early death in 1861 that a hundred years later there was hardly any anxiety about the succession and marriage of Princess Elizabeth. Indeed, the biggest problem was felt to be Prince Philip’s ...”

“... Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded in 1587. English observers, anxious about James VI of Scotland’s reaction to his mother’s execution, were alarmed to discover that the greatest of the Scottish Catholic peers, George Gordon, Sixth Earl of Huntly, was rapidly becoming his chief confidant ...”

“... Queen consorts usually have their lives written by the Barbara Cartlands of biography, romantics like Joan Haslip whose life of the famous fascinator Elizabeth of Austria, the last empress but one, was as spirited as its subject. Gordon Brook-Shepherd is not that kind of writer at all (nor was his empress that kind of empress ...”

“... Succession Crisis (1998), has chosen to focus his study on the controversial subject of the Queen of Scots. Mary Stuart always claimed she was the victim of conspiracies by her enemies and her Victorian defenders had no doubt Cecil was chief among them. The case against Cecil has recently been revived by Alford’s ...”

“... From the moment they met until what Walter Scott called the ‘brutal insanity’ of the queen’s trial for adultery in 1820, the relationship was a catastrophe acted out in public with little regard for decency, let alone dignity. Ever since, this riveting spectacle of royals behaving badly has offered ample ...”

“... and aunts, younger sons and daughters, cousins and more distant relatives of big daddy and the queen bee. By birth and by definition, they are lifelong occupants of the substitutes’ bench, permanent understudies for the starring roles which rarely if ever come their way, too near the throne to be ordinary people, too ...”

“... Ever since Disraeli made Queen Victoria Empress of India in 1876, the Conservative Party has been one of the lion-supporters of the British Crown, and to this day, the monstrous regiment of Tory women, and the blimpish cohorts of retired colonels, are among the most loyal and devoted of Her Majesty’s subjects ...”

“... of a spate of Mortonesque knife-jobs. It was also supposed that what the Sun called the Queen’s bum year might be followed by an even worse year in 1993. This was naive. Like the practised survivors that they are, the members of the royal family have imitated the foxes that so many of them hunt, and gone to ...”

“... in silk and chiffon, the debutantes waited with their mothers and fathers to curtsey to the queen. After this initiation ceremony, dating back to the reign of George III, they would be officially ‘out’, launched into the world, the London Season and the marriage market. It was, as Jessica Mitford wrote two years ...”

“... particular ambition.After her time in the Netherlands, Anne moved to the French court to wait on Queen Claude, wife of Francis I. Claude surrounded herself with an educated, cultured community of women. She owned pictures by Raphael and Sebastiano del Piombo, and encouraged her husband’s patronage of Leonardo da ...”

“... talked in ever less respectful terms. She was cast as the id of the Windsors, beside her twinkling mother and impeccably dutiful sister. Margaret moved with the ‘fast’ set, drank, smoked and sometimes looked bored at official events. By the end of the 1960s she was lampooned as Monty Python’s ‘pantomime Princess Margaret’ lurching around ‘in the ...”