George vi

It was George VI who first called his extended family ‘the Firm’. Today, with so many injuries and key players on the bench, it might better be known as ‘the Team’ – and one struggling to avoid relegation. It’s what you might call a reign in pain. So it’s a good time for Alexander Larman to publish this appreciative, but not sycophantic, conclusion to his royal trilogy. Its predecessors were The Crown in Crisis (2020) and The Windsors at War, published last year. The latest volume concerns the period between VE Day in 1945 and the coronation of the late Queen Elizabeth in 1953 when, in Larman’s telling, the royal

If you have ever thought that there cannot be anything new to say or to learn about the Queen, you have not yet read Robert Hardman’s revelatory new biography of her in this, her astonishing Platinum Jubilee year. Hardman has spent the past 30 years researching and understanding the British monarchy, and he writes with an extraordinary fount of knowledge but, even more important, with a heartfelt appreciation of what has been called ‘the genius of constitutional monarchy’ and for the members of the family who implement it. He has interviewed everyone possible, including Prince Philip’s German great-niece and almost everyone else on the German side of the family, of

Like department stores, empires and encyclopaedias, the multi-volume narrative national history is an invention of the later 18th century. It reaches its apogee, promising to bring everything important within a single enclosure, in the 19th and early 20th century. After that, ambitious examples appear to be fighting against a general lack of enthusiasm. Most of these works are little read now, from David Hume’s 1750s The History of England all the way through to Winston Churchill’s idiosyncratic A History of the English-Speaking Peoples in the 1950s. The grand sweep has a tendency to define the significant in advance. Many of these histories can explain a sequence of legislation, such as