"Many would have preferred this book not to be written, including the Yorks themselves."
So begins this deep dive into the "bizarre, tormented and sometimes wild world" of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, said Kate Mansey in The Times.
It is, centrally, a biography of the Duke himself, focused on his fall in recent years "from Falklands war hero to national disgrace". And it gives a "devastating" account of a life that its author, Andrew Lownie, portrays as both tragic (because Andrew's "character flaws" have determined his fate) and "so eccentric as to be laughable". There are many "cringe-inducing vignettes", including tales of Andrew's puerile jokes, odd habits and "rudeness" to staff. We learn of a punch-up with Prince Harry that left Andrew with a bloody nose (denied by Harry). More troubling are Lownie's allegations about the Duke's dealings with "some of the world's most undesirable businessmen", and his life as a "globetrotting womaniser", culminating in his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein and the alleged abuse, long denied by Andrew, of 17-year-old Virginia Giuffre.
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Lownie has previously written "similarly scabrous" books about the Mountbattens and the Duke of Windsor, and the revelations here are "predictably marmalade-dropping", said Alexander Larman in The Spectator. Nicknamed "Baby Grumpling" as an infant, Andrew was his mother's favourite child, but even she said he was "not always a little ray of sunshine". His Gordonstoun contemporaries remembered him as bullying and "arrogant". Lownie claims (without much evidence) that he has slept with "more than 1,000" women, and alleges that 40 escorts were sent to his hotel room during a single four-night trip to Thailand. However, Andrew also cuts a "lonely, essentially friendless figure", shy and oddly keen to help people; one source says his crossing paths with Epstein was like "putting a rattlesnake in an aquarium with a mouse". In his account of the Duke's subsequent disgrace and downfall, Lownie "achieves the near-impossible: one almost feels sorry for Prince Andrew".
As for Fergie, most of the news concerns her "spendthrift gluttony", said Christopher Howse in The Telegraph. She allegedly spent £25,000 in just one hour at Bloomingdale's, used to take nine holidays a year, employed 17 members of staff, demands a "banquet" be laid out every night, and so on. Overall, I found Lownie's tone towards the pair unkind, and his endless litany of accusations implausible and ultimately "indigestible".
