There’s no better place to learn about royals and their history than a book—and if you happen to be a reader fascinated by the British royal family in particular, then you’re in luck. As well as a handful of new releases, there are plenty of classic reads about the Windsors that remain relevant for 2025, lending context to new stories about King Charles, Queen Camilla, their relatives… and their relatives’ relatives.
Once you’ve checked out the new 2025 books Vogue can’t wait to read, dig into these unmissable tomes about the British royals—spanning just over 30 years of recent royal history.
My Story, by Sarah Ferguson
Lest you think that Prince Harry’s 2023 memoir, Spare, was the first royally penned tell-all, it was all the way back in 1996 when Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, published My Story with Jeff Coplon. This book was released after Sarah’s very public separation from Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, and was one of her first endeavors to earn an independent income. Full of self-analysis (and plenty of therapy-speak), Sarah reflects on her childhood, her mother’s departure from the family home, and her rough entry into—and exit from—the royal family. The book also offers plenty of Windsor trivia, from the protocols around having visitors at Buckingham Palace to Sarah’s feelings on the senior palace staffers—those “men in gray”—who would later bedevil Harry himself.
Any frequent biography reader will enjoy Craig Brown’s 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret and its departure from the traditional form. Instead of a linear birth-to-death narrative recapping Princess Margaret’s colorful life, Brown paints a vignette of her personality using 99 separate instances in which Margaret was either directly or indirectly observed. The book contains a rundown of her now-viral morning routine, which is indulgent to say the least. After finishing this book, one would be forgiven for thinking they were beginning to actually get to know Princess Margaret.
Diana: Her True Story is required reading for any royal history buff. Published in 1992, there was some obfuscation at the time from the princess about her level of involvement in the book. As the years went by, however, it was clear that Diana collaborated directly with author Andrew Morton, making this something of an autobiography too—Diana’s effort to advance her version of what went down during her time as a royal, particularly, of course, with regards to her marriage to then-Prince Charles. Charles would later take a similar approach by collaborating with Jonathan Dimbleby on a 1994 book and documentary project titled simply The Prince of Wales. Both books offer sympathetic portraits of their subjects, but also normalized the phenomenon of royals telling their own stories through memoirs.
The Little Princesses, by Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret’s childhood nanny Marion “Crawfie” Crawford, was the first in a long line of serve-and-tell memoirs from royal staff. Crawford, who published the book in 1950, had a front-row seat to the wartime childhoods of Elizabeth and Margaret, and shares plenty of harmless but illuminating details about the children’s routines and their close relationship with their parents, George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. One such insight pertains to the early courtship between then-Princess Elizabeth and a young Greek prince named Philip, who impressed his future bride with antics like jumping in the air and stuffing his mouth with shrimp. Despite the fact that Crawford was essentially excommunicated by the royal family and lost her grace-and-favor home after publishing the book, she did not become a cautionary tale—many other former royal employees would go on to write about their own experiences over the years.
Thank goodness Anne Glenconner wrote this book and shared about her fascinating, singular life. As the longtime best friend of Princess Margaret and long-suffering wife of the tempestuous Baron Colin Glenconner, developer of the island of Mustique, Anne participated in a number of major royal events in the mid-twentieth century. Among many royal exploits, Anne and Colin welcomed an (initially skeptical) Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip to Mustique and offered Margaret the land where she’d build her Caribbean hideaway, Les Jolies Eaux. This book is Anne’s story of her friendship with Margaret and her enduring association with the broader royal family, including King Charles—and, touchingly, explores her family life and the struggles she endured despite her apparently opulent existence.
Charles Spencer, younger brother of Princess Diana and steward of their family’s ancestral home, Althorp, has distinguished himself as an author of numerous non-fiction history books—but it’s his memoir, A Very Private School, which is most affecting. In it, Spencer reflects on being sent to a harsh and abusive boarding school as a child—and while there is very little of Diana in the book, it’s nonetheless a must-read for royal fans. This deeply personal book offers insight into a whole social class’s practice of shipping sons off to boarding school at a young age, and begs the question: Why, and at what cost?
Paul Burrell might have avoided “pulled a Crawfie”—i.e., worked for the royals and then turned around and published a book about it—had he not been taken to court in 2002 and accused of stealing from his late employer, Princess Diana. But, as the story goes, the trial and its subsequent publicity made Burrell’s work dry up, and a lucrative book deal was impossible to resist. The result, 2003’s A Royal Duty, is a reflection on Paul’s journey from a childhood in a Northern England mining town to all the pomp and circumstance at Buckingham Palace. He shares one-of-a-kind insights into the daily lives of the royals he served, which included Queen Elizabeth, then-Prince Charles, and of course, Princess Diana—reflecting on major events, like the breakdown of Charles and Diana’s marriage, while also sharing some of the smaller details, such as how to brush a carpet to royal satisfaction.
King Charles’s list of hobbies may be very, very long, but somewhere near the top is his love of watercolor painting. Over decades, he (or a butler) has schlepped his easel, paints, and canvases across mountains, meadows, and stately home yards to set up shop and capture a landscape. Many of the results were published in his 1991 book Watercolours, which is now out of print but available to intrepid online shoppers happy with a second-hand copy. Watercolours and its surprisingly competent pictures will enliven any coffee table—and surely provoke more than a few visitors to thumb its pages and reflect on Charles’s varied interests.
There’s no one in the royal reporting game who can write a zinger about Windsors like Tina Brown—and her 2022 book The Palace Papers exhibits her pure mastery of reflecting on the royals. Much of the content touches on the exemplary reporting from her 2007 book The Diana Chronicles, but the 15 years between books left quite a bit of new ground to cover, especially given the introduction of both Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle to the family. The Palace Papers will have you shaking your head and laughing from one page to the next, and offers an essential primer on the idiosyncrasies of the modern “Firm.”
Angela Kelly was more than just a dresser to the late Queen Elizabeth; over the years, she became a close confidant and earned the titles of personal assistant, adviser, and curator to Her Majesty the Queen. Prior to the Queen’s death, Kelly received permission to write a book about her experiences designing and creating the monarch’s wardrobe in the later decades of her life. The result, 2019’s The Other Side of the Coin, includes insights into Kelly’s working relationship with the Queen and background on important pieces of royal fashion. It’s a fascinating work of firsthand insight into maintaining a sovereign’s public image.
