Tales of rows, insults and online hostilities in Britain's royal families

I'm not sure I can bring myself to actually read it, but the publication this week of Entitled: the Rise and Fall of the House of York, by Andrew Lownie, promises to enliven a dead patch of summer with — putting Jeffrey Epstein aside — a wealth of petty revelations, a jog back through Prince Andrew's most ridiculous episodes and an opportunity to use the phrase "the disgraced duke." Shall we?

- Emma Brockes

Monday

Lownie's unauthorised 400-page book goes deep into the history of the royal family's biggest liability, a man who, per the author's sources, screams at his staff in a way reminiscent of no one more so than that other, famously rude member of the royal family, the late Princess Margaret.

It covers the Battle for Royal Lodge, in which the late Queen's second son is depicted as hanging on by his fingernails to the 30-room property in Windsor while, behind the scenes, Prince William works to get him out.

Disappointingly, there are no specifics as to the exact nature of the "rude" remark Andrew allegedly made to Catherine, Princess of Wales. But there is an itemisation of the duke's many eccentricities, including the stuffed animals on his bed well into adulthood, the daily "air showers" in which he sits on the balcony with his eyes shut sucking in air, and the enduring oddness of his relationship with his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, whose long life of grift and overspending, according to Lownie, includes running up £4,000 in extra baggage charges by taking 25 suitcases on holiday.

On Andrew's friendship with Epstein the author writes, shrewdly I think, that "the prince was a useful idiot who gave [Epstein] respectability and access to political leaders and business opportunities."

Per the book, Andrew is venal, thick and often just nasty. One story recounts a camping trip he took at the age of 13, during which he threw his friends' groundsheets in the river as a joke.

"He thinks he's funny, handsome and clever," says the source of the story. "And he isn't... He was a tosser." Which, funnily enough, and if Lownie is to be believed, is the same word used by Prince William to describe his uncle.