'Britain's Royal Families' became my first published book, in 1989, from The Bodley Head, and the rest of the story is - dare I say it? - history!
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We went to the British Museum, and I was looking up my family in the books - pages and pages on it.
The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more.
My story is the story of many postwar British families. Upward mobility. A council house and then new affluence.
The book that meant most to me was 'The Wind in the Willows.' It sounds ridiculous, but that was my vision of England.
My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.
I didn't belong to the sort of family where the children's classics were laid on. I went to the public library and read everything I could get my hands on.
I read a lot about her. I read a lot of bios. I read bios about the royal family; I read this little novella called 'The Uncommon Reader,' which is a fiction: it's about Queen Elizabeth going on this library bus and choosing books and reading them, but it's so sweet.
The book that made a lasting impression was the one my mother gave each of us when she decided we were ready for our first 'adult novel,' Lucy Maud Montgomery's 'The Blue Castle.'
For a time during the 1980s the Royal Family were not just the most influential family in Britain but probably in Europe and Prince Charles specifically was very much like a defacto Cabinet member and what he said actually had impact on public policy.
I have begun the 'History of England' by Mr. Hume. It seems to me very interesting, though it is necessary to recollect that it is a Protestant who has written it.