C2206

On the afternoon of January 18, 1919, at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, a 13-year-old boy suffered a seizure and stopped breathing. The room was small, the light already failing in the deep of an English winter. The boy was Prince John, the youngest son of King George V and Queen Mary. … Read more

Diana Spencer was not a naive girl from the English countryside who stumbled into the most photographed marriage of the century and found the machinery frightening. That story has been told so many times it has worn grooves into the culture, in films, memoirs, documentaries, stage productions, and no fewer than three separate television series, … Read more

In the early 1970s, inside a 20-room apartment at Kensington Palace, Princess Margaret opened the drawer where she kept her gloves and found a piece of paper her husband had left for her. It was a list. According to the biographer Anne de Courcy, who spent years interviewing the man who wrote it, the list … Read more

On the morning of April 11, 1919, an elderly woman in black stood on the quayside at Yalta Harbor and watched British sailors load her trunks onto a warship. She was 71 years old. Her eldest son had been murdered nine months earlier in a basement in Yekaterinburg, along with his wife and all five … Read more

The photograph went out on a Sunday morning in March 2024, timed for Mothering Sunday in Britain. It showed Catherine, Princess of Wales, seated on a wooden garden chair surrounded by her three children, smiling in a soft cardigan. It was the first image of her released since major abdominal surgery two months earlier had … Read more

On May 8, 1963, in the Court of Session in Edinburgh, a judge named John Wheatley began reading aloud from a document so long that reporters in the press gallery had brought spare notebooks. Wheatley was a Lord Ordinary of the Scottish bench, a Catholic, a former Lord Advocate, and a man trained to say … Read more