The Palace Papers Quotes

“Grief is the price we pay for love.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers

“You can shed tears that she is gone or you can smile because she has lived. You can close your eyes and pray that she’ll come back or you can open your eyes and see all she’s left.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“Embarrassment is a choice that an individual makes.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“Elizabeth I, Victoria, Elizabeth II. It turns out women are very good at this job.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“She’s a woman who leaves a glow behind her when she works a room.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“Meghan did not—or could not—perceive the difference between the Queen’s personal aide and a contract stylist at NBC Universal”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“when you marry your mistress, you create a job vacancy.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“As the Queen’s grandmother Queen Mary once said to a relative, “You are a member of the British royal family. We are never tired and we all love hospitals.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“the physical letter belongs to the person who received it, but the content of the letter belongs to the person who wrote it.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“all you have to do is smile and look as if you enjoy doing it”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“It happens to be a fact that the Queen adores anything to do with bridges and tunnels,”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“the Dunning-Kruger effect, the cognitive bias in which people come to believe that they are smarter and more capable than they really are.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“Diana was always more beautiful in person than in photographs”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“the shared secret that the formalities were both utterly absurd and absolutely necessary.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“I have to be seen to be believed.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“Royals,”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers

“When they go low, we go high.” She later explained, “ ‘Going high’ doesn’t mean you don’t feel the hurt, or you’re not entitled to an emotion. It means that your response has to reflect the solution….I’m not trying to win the argument. I’m trying to figure out how to understand you and how I can help you understand me.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“Like his friend and peer Peter Beard, but less wacky, he was an adventurer from the nineteenth-century Sir Richard Burton school who wandered the world on extravagant connections and an adequate trust fund.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“If the Sussexes had any residual misgivings about whether they wanted out, those doubts vanished when they viewed the Queen’s 2019 televised Christmas message. With their own eyes, they saw that they had been kicked to the margins of the monarchy. Her Majesty eloquently made the point in her speech by saying nothing. The subtext was all in the flotilla of carefully arranged family photographs positioned on her writing desk, a grouping that, in case anyone thinks is accidental, has been artfully changed every year since the monarch’s first televised seasonal message in 1957. The previous Christmas, a family portrait of Charles, Camilla, the five Cambridges, and Harry and Meghan was exhibited at Her Majesty’s elbow. But in December 2019, the Sussexes had evaporated, their image excised as skillfully as Stalin would have done to an apparatchik out of favor. According to author Christopher Andersen, the Queen told the director of the broadcast that all the displayed photographs were fine to remain in the shot except for one. Her Majesty pointed at a winsome portrait of Harry, Meghan, and baby Archie. “ That one,” said the Queen. “I suppose we don’t need that one.” And a happy Christmas to you too, Granny! William was said to have been appalled when he saw the Sussexes had been edited out. He knew his brother well enough to predict a Category 5 tantrum brewing.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“Prince Philip’s study in his private quarters at Wood Farm, the house on the Sandringham Estate where he spent much of his retirement years, was as minimal and uncluttered as the boardroom of a ship. His was always the leanest operation of the Palace machine, deploying only two private secretaries, an equerry, and a librarian to execute several hundred royal engagements a year. Despite his peremptory manner, he was by far the most popular member of the family to work for—“very unassuming and knows that it is not always as easy to do something as it is to ask for it be done,” as one household servant put it. In 2008, he gave his Savile Row tailor (John Kent of Norton & Sons) a fifty-one-year-old pair of trousers to be altered.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“An exasperated Mark Bolland, trying to spin some positive press in the midst of all this, found himself reluctantly pulled in to broker a secret détente between the butler and the heir to the throne. Fortuitously, Charles fell off his horse playing polo and went to the hospital instead.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“What Diana’s younger son was thinking only he can tell us, and doubtless will.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“Until he lost his hair, Prince William was probably the biggest heartthrob to be heir to the throne since the pre-obese Henry VIII.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“Philip had to apologize in 1999 after a walkabout at an Edinburgh electronics factory when he commented that a fuse box bursting with wires looked “as if it was put in by an Indian.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“To show Meghan how it was done, the Queen invited the family fledgling to accompany her a month after the wedding to open a six-lane toll bridge in the town of Chester, near Liverpool. One should, perhaps, detect Her Majesty’s dry sense of humor in the choice of engagement.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“Dacre's staff referred to his morning editorial meetings as the “Vagina Monologues,” because of his habit of calling everybody a “cunt.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“Princess Anne had once quipped that female Royals are honorary men,”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“the image that was soldered on the heart of the nation was of the Queen, small and bereft in her black mask and simple black hat and coatdress, grieving alone”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“the Sussexes found that being non-working royals takes a lot of work.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil

“reason is that they all do their duty, and they wonder what is so unique.”
― Tina Brown, The Palace Papers: Inside the House of Windsor - the Truth and the Turmoil