Ask Sir James

"Sir James Reid was her doctor and it was said of him that she consulted her doctor like some people consult the stock market – three times a day. He never examined her, which was an extraordinary thing. It would have been very helpful if he had been allowed to do so. And he only discovered all sorts of things after she died. But it is a wonderful description of life in Queen Victoria’s court – the awful Munshi [her Indian servant] – which of course is fascinating. This book describes the last days of Queen Victoria and the Kaiser arriving and all the different people in the court so it really is very interesting. I would put it slightly differently. One hopes that there is a good diarist recording court life. Their works really are fascinating. That is what we biographers look to find. We need the person who was a benign observer with an acute sense of what was going on."