Books

Line of Duty: Adrian Dunbar on plans for a new season By the time an exasperated Met Commissioner Sir John Waldron asked Mark to do something about the breakdown in CID discipline, Scotland Yard was staggering from the effects of multiple scandals. Waldron’s invitation to act was the green light …

It’s been 12 years since George RR Martin last published a book in his A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series.  Since Game of Thrones concluded four years ago, the 74-year-old has been reassuring his fans that he’s working hard on the next book, The Winds of Winter. He …

This year marks the 70th anniversary of Ian Fleming’s James Bond and incredibly, for the first time ever, 007 is now On His Majesty’s Secret Service following the death of the late Queen. A new official novel of the same name by Young Bond author Charlie Higson, has been published …

Queen ‘put herself up’ for 2012 James Bond sketch says writer With all the royal rebranding going on – from the King’s cypher on the Beefeaters’ uniforms at the Tower of London, his head on stamps, coins and banknotes, and, ultimately, changes to British passports and post boxes – it’s …

Roger Morgan-Grenville photographed at home in West Sussex for the Daily Express (Image: Steve Reigate) These days, what we once called nature we now call biodiversity. And, ironically, for the developed country with by far the highest per capita proportion of conservation group membership in the world, we are also …

King Charles III will be crowned the British monarch this weekend at the first Coronation in 70 years at Westminster Abbey. Yet if the UK had succession laws that skipped females like the Iron Throne in Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon and Fire and Blood – as has …

GMB debate on ‘pledge of allegiance to the King’ for the coronation It was perhaps the nearest the steadfastly stoic Queen had ever come to a nervous breakdown. In July 1969, in the wake of the Investiture of Charles as Prince of Wales and a series of violent threats from …

Charlie Higson is the author of the official Young James Bond novels and has finally written an adventure about an adult 007. On His Majesty Secret’s Service is set two days before King Charles III’s Coronation and is released the same day, with Fleming’s spy having to save the new …

Half of the 2023 shortlist for the Women’s Prize for Fiction is made up of debut novels from older writers – with the youngest of them aged 49. Trespasses by Louise Kennedy, Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris and Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks were all picked – in a blow …

Megan loves her life at the Tower (Image: steve reigate) Anne Boleyn, and Henry VIII’s other doomed wives, regularly traipse past Megan Clawson’s front door. That’s because the 22-year-old lives at the Tower of London, the 13th-century royal palace in the heart of the capital where traitors were once imprisoned …