Kings and Queens and Jokers, Too by Astolat

Never before have all the stories about all the bit players, from Prince Philip to Princess Margaret, from the Queen Mother to the grimly devoted old courtiers, been collected in a single, useful place. Although the godlike luster has eroded and the institution has been diminished, even disgraced, the need for enchantment endures and the hope for renewal remains.' That sobering final judgment comes at the end of 500 occasionally steamy pages that savage and genuinely illuminate the careers of the flawed humans who have occupied and circled the throne this century. That yearning to look up to someone or something grand, even grandiose, still exists. 'They have survived because their subjects had a need to believe in them. Even as Britain reassesses its monarchy, the monarchy retains its genius for adaptability and compromise, almost defying destruction,' runs her thoughtful final chapter. 'The weight of history favors survival of an institution that continues to reinvigorate itself. And despite the exhausting catalogue of the faults of the recent and current crop of Windsors, Kitty Kelley seems finally to have been persuaded that there is life in the old mob yet. Speculation, therefore, of the monarchy's imminent demise would appear shakily founded. The third would be by act of Parliament, a democratic procedure that contains its own catch: that the written royal assent is required before any such act becomes law.

The second would be bloody insurrection with the tumbrils rolling down the Mall, and the swish of the guillotine or the rope looping over the lamppost to write the last bloody chapter to a sanguinary dynastic history.

The first would be a disastrous war culminating in hostile invasion of the kind that ended the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires after the conflict of 1914-18.

There are only three ways to rid Britain of its royals. It will take more than the sudden death of a divorced princess and a deliciously readable almanac of all available gossip by Kitty Kelley to unseat an institution so resiliently durable. $27 THE BRITISH MONARCHY has endured for more than 11 centuries, give or take a regicide, a brief Cromwellian Republic, a Restoration, two Revolutions, two crown-shifting foreign invasions, repeated civil wars and an often meandering bloodline.

Kings and Queens and Jokers, Too by Astolat