The best royal biography ever written is probably James Pope-Hennessy’s Queen Mary. Published in 1959, only six years after the queen’s death, it is a masterpiece: no one has written better about her German relations, about her larger-than-life mother, Fat Mary, the Duchess of Teck, or about the royal family in the early 20th century. It is an astonishingly candid book, considering that it was published at the time when the royal code of secrecy was at its height. The greatest tribute to the author is that no serious life of Queen Mary has appeared since.
Pope-Hennessy didn’t actually want to write the book. When the royal librarian Owen Morshead asked him to do it, his first instinct was to refuse. He was an unlikely choice for the job. Someone described him as ‘two characters lodged in one shell’. One was the hard-working professional writer, the witty talker and confidante of smart women such as Maud Russell or Anne Fleming.
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