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The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil
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About This Book
The gripping inside story of the British royal family's battle to overcome the dramas of the Diana years—only to confront new, twenty-first-century crises "Never again" became Queen Elizabeth II's mantra shortly after Princess Diana's tragic death. More specifically, there could never be "another Diana"—a member of the family whose global popularity upstaged, outshone, and posed an existential threat to the British monarchy. Picking up where Tina Brown's masterful The Diana Chronicles left off, The Palace Papers reveals how the royal family reinvented itself after the traumatic years when Diana's blazing celebrity ripped through the House of Windsor like a comet. Brown takes readers on a tour de force journey through the scandals, love affairs, power plays, and betrayals that have buffeted the monarchy over the last twenty-five years. We see the Queen's stoic resolve after the passing of Princess Margaret, the Queen Mother, and Prince Philip, her partner for seven decades, and how she triumphs in her Jubilee years even as family troubles rage around her. Brown explores Prince Charles's determination to make Camilla Parker Bowles his wife, the tension between William and Harry on "different paths," the ascendance of Kate Middleton, the downfall of Prince Andrew, and Harry and Meghan's stunning decision to step back as senior royals. Despite the fragile monarchy's best efforts, "never again" seems fast approaching. Tina Brown has been observing and chronicling the British monarchy for three decades, and her sweeping account is full of powerful revelations, newly reported details, and searing insight gleaned from remarkable access to royal insiders. Stylish, witty, and erudite, The Palace Papers will irrevocably change how the world perceives and understands the royal family.
Reviews
"The Palace Papers is an apt title for what sometimes seems like a briefcase stuffed to overflowing with such conjecture, plus clippings, transcripts, observations, wry asides, literary references and trivial tidbits ..."
"Brown knows that the crumbs that fall from royal bird tables are intrinsically funny ..."
"Tina Brown, the writer making the comment in her new royal potboiler, is not, in that sense, nice ..."
"Royal watchers won't be much fazed by the new material, and all the 'I am told's in the world can't match the thrill of a devastating on-the-record scoop."
"Brown is quite inexhaustible."
"Brown thrashes her way through absolutely everything that has happened to the family since the end of the last book in 1997 — the good, the bad and, in the case of the 2012 Olympics, the downright boring."
"Even Meghan's father, who has a thriving side business betraying his daughter in the tabloids, comes off better than she does ..."
"entertaining and illuminating, but not tawdry, even as [Brown] deals with all kinds of tawdry actions ..."
"I think the fascination of the monarchy is that no matter how many books are written about them, and no matter how hagiographic they intend to be, there's always some new information within that proves they're even more repulsive than you originally thought."
"Some of the more interesting morsels, such as the view that the Queen sees Charles as too emotional and too materialistic, or that Ghislaine Maxwell once showed a friend implements with which her father beat her, are drawn from previous books ..."
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