British publishing, like its women’s magazines, feeds off the royals. The latest tabloid furore is over Charles, Earl Spencer’s book, Swan Song, honouring his late sister Princess Diana. Spencer’s claim that King Charles spoke dismissively about his late wife soon after her death has already earned a sharp, and unusual, rebuke from the Palace

Spencer’s memoir will be released this week. While we can’t yet assess its merit, a few books amid the dross do capture the peculiarities of the modern monarchy: its extreme wealth and the combination of tradition and celebrity that helps explain its persistence.

I begin this list with author Hilary Mantel’s apt observation in her acerbic 2013 lecture Royal Bodies. “Our current royal family doesn’t have the difficulties in breeding that pandas do,” she noted. “But pandas and royal persons alike are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment […] everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.”

Prince Harry is the most recent royal to escape the cage, while still wanting to feast off the bamboo.

1. The Crown in Crisis – Alexander Larman

No scandal has shaken the British crown in the past century as much as the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936 “to marry the woman I love” the American divorcee, Wallis Simpson. There are many books on the subject, but the best might be Alexander Larman’s The Crown in Crisis (2022), which captures the pair’s romance and the battle within the establishment to prevent their marriage.

The strength of the book is its discussion of divisions over the suitability of such a marriage and the determination of the prime minister at the time, Stanley Baldwin, to uphold the Anglican........

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