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.