Bertie: A Life of Edward VII, by Jane Ridley

This book deserves to be named in the same breath as those two great classics of royal biography, Roger Fulford’s Royal Dukes and James Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary. It shares with those two masterpieces the double advantage of being profoundly learned and a cracking good read. There is scarcely a paragraph of Bertie which does not contain new material, most of it culled from the Royal Archives, but also from a wide variety of other sources, including the diaries — which Jane Ridley discovered in the Royal College of Physicians — of Bertie’s German medic, Dr Sieveking.

Its most affecting passages — and there are many — derive their power from the accumulation of carefully gathered detail. In the chapter entitled ‘Annus Horribilis’, we read of the premature birth of Bertie and Alix’s last child, little Prince John, who lived just 24 hours. The sobbing Alix kept the baby with her in bed and held his hand which ‘was warm, though his head was cold and his limbs were stiffening’.