Цитаты из книг — Джайлз Брандрет

— Вы все замечаете, друг мой! Я решил, что у Шерлока Холмса должен быть еще более проницательный старший брат и с вашего разрешения в качестве модели я возьму вас! Холмс главным образом списан мной с доктора Белла, но он немного похож на мистера Фрейзера. А брат Холмса будет вашей копией, Оскар… — Но я не похож на Холмса,…

‘If you believe the attention is for you personally,’ he warned, ‘you’re going to end up in trouble. The attention is for your role, what you do, what you’re supporting. It isn’t for you as an individual. You are not a celebrity. You are representing the Royal Family. That’s all. Don’t look at the camera. The Queen never…

When the Duke was critical of his wife, berating her for paying attention to the dogs when she should be listening to him, or wondering out loud why she was spending so much time on the telephone, or telling her she was wearing the wrong clothes for a shooting expedition, the Queen was quite capable of answering back,…

In the 1950s, when out in London shopping on her own, in case she was knocked down by a bus and nobody would know who she was, she kept a small card in her handbag which read: ‘I am the Queen of Sweden.’ More recently, Queen Margrethe II of Denmark told me: ‘European royalty like coming to England because no one knows who…

During the interval, in the mezzanine bar, drinks were served and the Queen and her husband did what they had done countless times before: they worked the room. He took one end, she took the other, and, for half an hour, the royal couple mingled, shaking hands with smiling strangers, nodding, chatting, then moving on. I…

By any standards, Philip has known a lot of loss in his young life and one way people deal with loss is with stoicism. To take on board the full throttle of what has happened to you is too painful, so you use your defence mechanisms well. You rationalise your experience. You don’t dwell on it. You don’t discuss it.…

‘It’s simply what happened,’ is what Prince Philip had said to me. ‘The family broke up. My mother was ill, my sisters were married, my father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does.’

As one of her private secretaries said to me, ‘The Queen represents the very best of Britain, of its values and its heritage. In many ways, she represents the soul of the nation.’

When I told him I had found a constituency where I hoped to be the candidate, he gave me useful advice on how to make small talk with all and sundry. He offered the question ‘What’s keeping you busy these days?’ as an all-purpose opening gambit. (The ingenuity of the phrasing comes into its own when the person you are…

Certainly, if you suggested that he might have been personally frustrated that the Queen’s accession to the throne in 1952 had brought his naval career to a premature close, he would deny it. ‘You have to make compromises,’ he said to me. ‘That’s life. I accepted it. I tried to make the best of it.’

Prince Philip was born in 1921 and brought up in the age when introspection equalled self-indulgence and a stiff upper lip was a virtue, not a disability. He made his marriage work, both because he wanted to and because, in his day, that’s what you did. ‘You’ve made your bed, now lie on it.’