Queen Victoria
Anniversary
‘You must promise to be with us for our silver wedding D.V. which will be in four years,’ wrote Queen…
Fame and scandal in the family
The first Marquess of Dufferin and Ava is largely forgotten today — rotten luck for the great diplomat of the…
Elephant in the room
In the centre of the new exhibition Sculpture Victorious at Tate Britain there is a huge white elephant. The beast…
From socialite to socialist
Princess Sophia Alexandrovna Duleep Singh (1876–1948) had a heritage as confusing as her name. Her father was a deposed Indian…
Dizzy with devotion
The long, happy and unlikely marriage of the great Conservative leader Disraeli and his wife Mary Anne, 12 years his…
After Albert
A new, revisionist biography argues that it was only after her husband’s death that Queen Victoria found her true self. Jane Ridley is impressed
Diary
Like many inward-looking children, I always doodled stories and poems. Knowing one wanted to be a writer is a different…
One queen, cut by two others
Queen Victoria was the inventor of official royal biography. It was she who commissioned the monumental five-volume life of Prince…
England
Who, my husband asked, expects every man will do his duty? He was responding to the interesting and important question…
We were not amused
Princess Louise (1848–1939), Queen Victoria’s fourth daughter, was the prettiest and liveliest of the five princesses, and the only one…
Clash of the Titans
This is an odd book: interesting, informative, intelligent, but still decidedly odd. It is a history of the Victorian era…
Black and beyond
When Prince Albert died in 1861, aged 42, Queen Victoria, after briefly losing the use of her legs, ordered that…
For the greater glory of Benjamin Disraeli
Sam Leith finds shades of Jeffrey Archer and Boris Johnson in the 19th-century prime minister
