Tina Brown, the writer making the comment in her new royal potboiler, is not, in that sense, nice.

Well-sourced and exhaustively researched.

Brown thrashes her way through absolutely everything that has happened to the family since the end of the last book in 1997 — the good, the bad and, in the case of the 2012 Olympics, the downright boring. How fun a chapter is depends on how badly the royals are behaving, which makes anything before 2010 dull. In the absence of any serious meat, you simply have to lie back and let her heady mix of light gossip and turn of phrase wash over you.

Featuring a combination of preexisting press accounts and Brown’s own reporting, it’s high-minded and gossipy, and addictively readable, despite a slow first half spent revisiting the well-trod history of the Diana Years. Much like the royal family itself, it gets more interesting when Meghan comes along.

... will be widely read because it’s very readable. Brown’s prose has the swoosh of an enjoyably OTT ballgown. Yet readers should not expect to be too enlightened. Some of the more interesting morsels, such as the view that the Queen sees Charles as too emotional and too materialistic, or that Ghislaine Maxwell once showed a friend implements with which her father beat her, are drawn from previous books.

The story of Britain’s royal family, in the hands of Tina Brown, is a sort of high-spirited tragedy.

The Palace Papers is an apt title for what sometimes seems like a briefcase stuffed to overflowing with such conjecture, plus clippings, transcripts, observations, wry asides, literary references and trivial tidbits.

I think the fascination of the monarchy is that no matter how many books are written about them, and no matter how hagiographic they intend to be, there’s always some new information within that proves they’re even more repulsive than you originally thought. This is genuinely impressive – superhuman, even – given that the Windsor’s shenanigans are about as unexamined as the assassination of JFK.

I must admit that I did not have high hopes of The Palace Papers.

... revealing.