About a decade ago, with my writing career going nowhere fast, I received some savvy advice from my then-literary agent. “Write about the royal family,” he said. “There’s an endless appetite for books about them. They combine history, social commentary and gossip with old-fashioned fascination with the rich and powerful. You can’t go wrong.”

I listened to his advice and wrote a trilogy of books about the Windsors: The Crown in Crisis, The Windsors at War and Power and Glory. The first two sold very well, and the third was barely noticed, but I was glad that I took my agent’s counsel, even if we had to part ways because he had practiced what he preached, and diversified from historical biography into his own career writing about the royals.

That agent was Andrew Lownie, whose devastating biography of the former prince Andrew, Entitled, was a vast success upon its publication in the United Kingdom last year. Unfortunately for readers in the United States, its passage has been less happy. It was to have been published by Simon & Schuster’s imprint Gallery Books, but they canceled it, calling the book “unreadable.” Lownie has accordingly issued legal action against the publisher, and denounced their decision as “very damaging.”

Gallery has not commented publicly on why it chose to pass up the chance to release such a presumably lucrative title, but the knowledge that Lownie’s UK publisher HarperCollins had to recall around 60,000 copies of the book, in order to delete some defamatory and “unverified” claims that Jeffrey Epstein introduced Donald Trump to Melania, might have given them pause. The First Lady has since said: “The lies linking me with Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,” and called the claims “mean-spirited attempts to defame my reputation.”

Still, if a royal biography does not contain some talking-point revelations, there is little point in its existence. At a time when, on both sides of the Atlantic, there is far less reverence toward the royal family than there once was, there is an opportunity for writers to come up with something mischievous and genuinely original. So why is much of the contemporary writing about the Firm so dreadful?

It is not as if there isn’t enough material. As King Charles prepares to make his first state visit to America – an event that has been far more controversial than anticipated, thanks to the Iran war and subsequent fallout between........

© The Spectator