PositiveSunday Times (UK)Brown thrashes her way through absolutely everything that has happened to the family since the end of the last book in 1997 — the good, the bad and, in the case of the 2012 Olympics, the downright boring. How fun a chapter is depends on how badly the royals are behaving, which makes anything before 2010 dull. In the absence of any serious meat, you simply have to lie back and let her heady mix of light gossip and turn of phrase wash over you ... Reading some of her more frothy sentences can feel almost alarming. At the first magazine she edited, Tatler, she invented a hyper-breathy kind of glossy writing in which it was essential to talk everything up ... Charles and Camilla are vividly brought to life in a series of well-researched stories and anecdotes ... It’s the details that really help you through the book’s arid patches. Sometimes it feels as if she is summarising every article that has been written about the family since 1997.
Barbara Amiel
PanThe Times (UK)... extraordinary ... What a divinely bonkers book this is — a crazed page-turner as written from the inside by Marie Antoinette. Nearly a decade after her husband was sent to prison — he was sentenced to 78 months — Amiel, who is 80 this year, writes the whole thing as if she’s still not sure what she did wrong...You just think: how deluded can you get? ... Like her husband, [Amiel] writes in dense, pompous sentences. Often it feels like thrashing your way through a thick, oversexed jungle ... This is nothing in comparison with the half-cock slavering pulp descriptions of how tall and handsome the uniformly dreadful men in her life were.
