That sounds plausible. Your first choice is Queen Mary by James Pope-Hennessy, whom you see as a bit of a role model as a royal biographer.

Yes I do, and one of the reasons is that it is the first royal biography that I ever read. I bought it when I was 13 on 30 January 1965 and I remember that date because it was Churchill’s state funeral. The next day I rather nervously told my parents that I had bought it, expecting to have my head bitten off, because that had happened once before when I expressed an interest in buying a book on the royal line of succession. They said, “Why do you want to be bothered with that sort of stuff?” But this time they seemed to be quite interested that I had done this. And so that really opened the floodgates and I have bought a lot since.

So I read it then, and I have read it several times since. And I did subsequently read James Pope-Hennessy’s papers so I know how he wrote it and what he was trying to do. Of course this was the official biography, but what I like about it is the fact he got away with so much. It is so beautifully written and it is terribly funny and you can read a lot between the lines. Let me read one of my favourite paragraphs. It is a description of Queen Mary at Marlborough House in the late 1940s not long before she died. He writes:

“In the midst of this shimmering Georgian enclave in bedraggled post-war London, visitors found Queen Mary herself, upright, distinguished, dressed perhaps in purple blue or in blue velvet or pale grey, around her neck her ropes of matchless pearls. Awed strangers talked of Queen Mary as a representative of another epoch but this was a misjudgment, for the Queen Dowager was in no way isolated, a magnificent relic, in these 18th century surroundings. She would sally forth from Marlborough House to the young court for juvenile delinquents – ‘It was most interesting but I have never heard so many lies told in my life’ – or to enjoy Oklahoma!or Annie Get Your Gun.”

I love that sort of stuff.

So she was truly modern then. As a young boy, what was it about the royals that so fascinated you, even though you weren’t particularly encouraged by your parents?

Well my mother did certainly like the royal family. But I think perhaps she was concerned about how my interests were going. It started a bit like trainspotting and then continued. She took me to see the state visit of the Shah of Persia in 1959 and I enjoyed it so much I asked her to take me out of school to see that of General de Gaulle in 1960 and that made a great impression. And then as I grew older I wanted to find out more and more about these people.

And was it the other worldliness and the spectacle that attracted you?

I think it was spectacle partly and also [the waxworks museum] Madame Tussaud’s helped me a lot. These days, like so many things, it has a kind of theme park atmosphere, but in those days it had all the royal family and little biographies of each one so you could find out who they were.