The Quest for Queen Mary

‘Arguably the most riotously funny volume published this year’ - The Sunday Times

‘A complete delight, conjuring up, with a few sharp strokes of the pen, a mad, exotic species from a world gone by … one of this year’s funniest and most eccentric books’ - Mail on Sunday

‘Superbly edited … like all the best interviews, these are stories about the hunter circling his prey, and they reveal as much about the interviewer as his subject … a splendid book’ - Spectator

‘Illuminating, intriguing and boundlessly entertaining’ - Country Life

‘Intoxicating, frank and often hilarious anthology of interviews … what this fine book demonstrates with wit, candour, and unassailable force, is that royal persons are not at all like ordinary people’ - New York Review of Books

‘A glorious glimpse into the lives of the lost upper classes … It’s the layers of observation that make the book sublime. At the top of the layers is Hugo Vickers, ideal editor of these notes’ - The Times

‘Magnificent … unmissable vignettes of most European royalty of the first half of the last century’ - The Daily Telegraph

‘Funniest book I read this year … the book evokes a now unimaginable world in which privilege went hand in hand with deference and privacy’ - Spectator

James Pope-Hennessy

James Pope-Hennessy was a British biographer and travel writer. His books included London Fabric (for which he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize), Sins of the Fathers (an account of the Atlantic slave traffickers), Anthony Trollope, and Queen Victoria at Windsor and Balmoral. He died in 1974.

Hugo Vickers

Hugo Vickers is a writer, lecturer, and broadcaster, and an acknowledged expert on the British Royal Family. He has written biographies of the Queen Mother, Cecil Beaton, Vivien Leigh, Princess Andrew of Greece, and the Duchess of Windsor. His book The Kiss won the 1996 Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction. His recent bestsellers have included Malice in Wonderland and The Sphinx - the life of Gladys, Duchess of Marlborough. He collaborated with HRH The Duke of Kent on A Royal Life. He is a Deputy Lieutenant for Berkshire.