Fun and games — except with mother

The Duke of Edinburgh, a New Zealand typist claimed in 1954, was ‘the best investment that the royal family has made in all its history’. But would she have thought so had she seen him a few days earlier at a ‘crazy’ party where, according to his first cousin Pamela Hicks, he ‘excelled himself, managing to use three cracker blowers at once — one in his mouth and one up each nostril, the shiny rolls unravelling simultaneously’?

Anecdotes like that are, I imagine, the chief reason why people buy books like this. Lady Pamela tells them well, especially those about her ancestors. The best-crafted character in the tale is her grandmother, Princess Victoria of Hesse, who was capable of carrying on three conversations in three languages at the same time. Another intriguing lady was her great aunt, who was murdered as a Russian grand duchess by the Bolsheviks but was subsequently resurrected by the Orthodox church as St Elizabeth of Romanova; there is a sculpture of her as a 20th-century martyr above the west door of Westminster Abbey.