The Royals - Softcover

Kelley, Kitty

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0446585149 ISBN 13: 9780446585149

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2010

Synopsis

The #1 New York Times bestselling, controversial portrait of the British royal family -- as told from behind the palace walls -- for fans of Netflix's The Crown and all royal watchers

They are the most chronicled family on the face of the globe. Their every move attracts headlines. Now Kitty Kelley has gone behind the scenes at Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and Kensington Palace to raise the curtain on the men and women who make up the British royal family. Queen Elizabeth, Prince Charles, Princess Diana...here are the scandals of the last decades: the doomed marriages and the husbands, wives, lovers and children caught in their wake and damaged beyond repair. No one is spared.

About this title

Review:

The audiocassette version of Kitty Kelley's The Royals is abridged, which means you just get the good stuff. Kelley herself reads, purring cattily along, narrating the downstairs gossip about the upstairs Windsors. Here's Queen Elizabeth insisting her 17 Welsh corgis appear on a TV special, and Prince Charles snatching one last rendezvous with Camilla Parker-Bowles on the eve of his marriage to Diana Spencer. The dish is delish, but after listening too long, it gets harder to sneer along with Kitty as the Royal Family takes on more tragic dimensions. The greatest crime a Windsor can commit is not infidelity, drunkenness, or unusual sexual practices. No, the worst sin is going before the public, as both Diana and Charles did in the aftermath of their stormy marriage, and telling people about it. For the Windsors, it seems, anything goes. Anything that is, but indiscretion.

From the Inside Flap:

They are the most chronicled family on the face of the globe. Their every move attracts headlines. Scores of books have tried and failed to penetrate the royal facade. Now Kitty Kelley, bestselling author of Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography and His Way: The Unauthorized Biography of Frank Sinatra, has gone behind palace walls to provide the first three-dimensional, comprehensive, and even-handed portrait of the men and women who make up the British royal family.

Kelley, the most fearless biographer of our time, spent more than four years investigating the royal family. In addition to meticulous research into documented sources, she conducted hundreds of exclusive interviews with past and present employees of the royal household, royal friends and relations, courtiers, members of Parliament, and other intimate observers. The author has unveiled and examined the private lives of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Margaret, Prince Phillip, Prince Charles, Princess Diana, Prince Andrew, and Sarah, the Duchess of York, as well as their forebears and predecessors, as no other biographer has been able to do.

Kitty Kelley has raised the curtain on this most secretive family. Here are lonely royal children brought up without a proper education in isolated and artificial surroundings, twentieth-century adolescents with nineteenth-century touchstones. Here are the sexual ambiguities, the alcoholism, gambling, and womanizing that were common in the House of Windsor long before Prince Charles married Lady Diana Spencer. No one is spared; here are the scandals of the last decades: the doomed marriages and the husbands, wives, lovers and children caught in their wake and damaged beyond repair.

Illuminating the Windsors' arrogance, naivete, and lusts as well as hard work, dedication, and the ability to survive the most humiliating disclosures, The Royals is Kitty Kelley's richest, most iconoclastic, historically significant, and compelling book. She smashes the images created by palace bureaucrats and perpetuated by our own fantasies. Yet she introduced readers to people they can understand and will never forget.

About this edition

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0446585149
• ISBN 13: 9780446585149
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 640