The Royals

I read one other Kitty Kelly book and that was SInatra and that was ages ago. After the Queen died I bought The Royals and i loved it. You get individual chapters on Elizabeth, the Queen Mum, Charles, Andrew, Fergie, Diana , Phillip, Mountbattan, and updated chapters that were added after the original book ended.The Royal divorces, Diana's death, The Princes Wm & Harry, the lovers, Camilla, etc. Worth reading just to know how much $$$$$$$$$$$$$ the Firm really has and makes from British taxpayers. None of this would fly in the US.

Kitty Kelley is as entertaining as they come--and certainly intrepid, unintimidated and marvelously descriptive as a biographer. I'd first read this book shortly after it's initial release--before Diana's death--and wanted an uncomplicated, gossipy read the other night. So I re-read the entire book, enjoying it just as much this time as I did originally! "The Royals" actually has a lot of accurate reporting when it comes to the historical background of the Windsors, the behind the scenes lives of the Queen and family, and what really went on immediately after Diana's death. I say this b/c before re-reading "The Royals," I've plowed through many far more serious tomes on the British royal family and books written by or with the participation of friends of the family--and what Kelley describes jibes with accounts gleaned from insiders. The small details Kelley dares to add (the information "insiders" probably wouldn't discuss) is appreciated--particularly the descriptions of the interiors of Princess Margaret's apartment (fraying wires, tottering TV trays and all.....let's hope William and Kate purge them from the space that is now THEIR home at Kensington Palace) and the other residences (tattered old carpets, substandard heating and A/C, ancient toilets that flush UP). The personalities of the Queen, Prince Phillip, Prince Charles, Princess Diana and the Queen Mother as described by Kelley are similar to what I've read in other books; she just takes it that one step further.....:-) The Queen is parsimonious aka cheap to a fault and turns a blind eye to Prince Phillip's affairs b/c in large part b/c she turned him out of her bed so as not to have more children while she was first "learning her job" as Queen. Her husband is a bully who once hit his assigned Secret Service agent repeatedly during a visit with President and Mrs. Reagan in California b/c he was impatient with the traffic delays. Charles dithers, lies and longs for the less complicated Camilla Parker-Bowles; not seeing that his lying about his love for Mrs. Parker-Bowles was a good part of the reason his new young wife became depressed, bulimic and determined to "give him some payback." Not that Diana is merely a victim and/or bathed in the sunshine of good deeds and "sainthood," as those who grieved her death recalled her. She is deceitful, purposely difficult, defiant with the Queen and the Queen Mother, and has two very bad habits she is unwilling to alter--her bulimia and attraction to bad men. One of the worst, James Hewitt, was going to publish some of Diana's letters to him in a book along with his personal impressions/memories of the Princess. When the Queen heard he was going to say things like "She has bad breath and wanted sex all the time," she intervened on Diana's behalf and Hewitt became Cad of the entire UK. The Queen Mother is seen as the real prevailing influence on the Queen but, while epitomizing royalty at its best, drinks heavily ("anyone else would be called an alcoholic" notes Kelley), gambles heavily and runs up huge debts ("addicted to alcohol AND gambling" says Kelley).It's a fun, fast read. The photos are good. And the research Kelley chooses to quote verbatim is insightful--and entertaining! "The Royals" is a good compliment to more detailed, serious and high minded histories of the Royal Family. In all seriousness, it humanizes this vast, prominent, proper family and therein makes them far more interesting.

It's makes for riveting reading, but a lot of what Kelley has written is distorted or resorts to unsubstantiated gossip. Also, many of her sources were dead before she wrote the book, and many others never came forward. No wonder this book couldn't be published in Britain. She was subject to too many libel laws. Even Anthony Holden, the pro-Diana, very critical anti-Monarchist biographer of Prince Charles (who once considered Holden one of his few friends in the media, but no more) did not mention Kelley by name in his 1998 bio Charles at Fifty; she was only revealed as the source for one of his quotes in the footnotes. It just goes to show that Holden did not consider Kelley a proper journalist he could quote directly.It was also distasteful for this trashy tome to be published less than two weeks after Diana's funeral, which it was, with no shame on September 16, 1997. Of course, Andrew Morton's Diana: Her True Story was also re-published that same month in Britain to even more condemnation. But at least Morton's book was well-sourced by Diana herself and many of her friends (with her permission, although she later dropped most of them). Kelley uses many anonymous quotes and thus The Royals should be read with a dose of common sense. It is the least professional of her many best-sellers; even her tabloid-style bios of Elizabeth Taylor and Nancy Reagan were better written than this tripe on the House of Windsor.In the opening chapter of The Royals, Kelley attempts to malign the Queen's sister by painting her as a neo-Nazi and then makes the mistake of writing that Anne Frank (whose attic wall was decorated with pictures of movie stars and of the little Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret) was carted off to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen after the 1944 discovery of her hiding place in Amsterdam. Anne did indeed die at the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945, but upon her arrest by the Gestapo the previous August 4, she, her family, a dentist they had taken in, and the three members of the Van Daan family were first sent to Gestapo headquarters in Amsterdam, then to the internment camp at Westerbork in North Holland, and four weeks later were put on the last train for Auschwitz, the massive Nazi death camp in Poland. They arrived at Auschwitz on September 6, 1944, after which the men were promptly separated from the womenfolk. Anne never saw her father again and believed that he went directly to the gas chamber. Her mother died at Auschwitz on January 27, 1945 of starvation and exhaustion. Her father was among the three thousand-odd survivors left at the camp by the Germans when the Russians liberated the area some days later. This was when Otto Frank learned of his wife's death from another survivor. Anne and Margot Frank had been sent to Belsen on October 16, 1944, and arrived in the German concentration camp three days later after a harrowing trip inside concealed box cars. At Belsen, the conditions were so horrible that it is incredible that anyone survived at all when the British liberated the camp five months later. Both Anne and her sister died of typhus and their frozen, skeletal bodies were later dumped in a pile outside their barracks to be disposed of by their campmates in an unmarked pit.I've read many books on Anne Frank, but hundreds more on the Royal Family and cannot believe that someone as well established as Kitty Kelley could overlook such details when she has always harped on her insistence that she is a fanatical fact-checker. There are several more bloopers of a similar kind in this so-called biography, but I am not going to go into vivid descriptions. Anyone with half a brain will be able to spot other discrepancies.

A really fun entertaining and to a large extent informative read. A must for all avid readers. I hope to read some more books by the same author.

“‘Royalty is royalty,’ he said. ‘Never to be questioned.’”The Royals by Kitty Kelley was such a fascinating look at the Royal family. I felt like reading all of the dirt that the other books are afraid to write. I will say I am taking a lot of the info with a grain of salt because I think sometimes people want to sensationalize royalty and anyone with fame to make their stories even more dramatic. That being said I would still recommend this book to anyone interested in the Royal family. I give the book 4 stars.“Those who had spent childhood nights huddled in London’s underground during World War II looked to royalty as a beacon. But those who grew up listening to the Beatles, not to the bombs, viewed the royal family as a relic.”

With Hurricane Ida and Nicholas flying and our soldiers dying in Afghanistan, I needed to escape into oblivion. This book was really gossipy, fun and one hoot! I t appears to be well research and pictures the totals as immoral

Delivered today, and I cannot put it down, it is so riveting, and exposes the Royals for what they are i.e. Over priviledged, Overrated, and Over paid parasites. I learned a lot about them, which has been cleverly covered up and concealed from the general masses. A must read book for anyone with a socialist mentality of equality and fairness in life, for all citizens.Highly recommended

Interesting book. Don’t know whether to believe it or not. However it is a great antidote to the usual gushing stories about royalty

I bought this for my wife and she says that it is a brilliantly written book that if you start to read it you can’t put it down

Quite an eye opener. No wonder it was banned here.

Some of this may be gossip. However, a lot of it makes good reading. There are many chapters.