royalty
Kings, queens, emperors — real, self-proclaimed, and occasionally both.
Montgomery's Ribs
William Harvey, the physician who proved blood circulates, once reached through a hole in a young viscount's ribs and took hold of the beating heart.
Too Great a Strain
Gertrude Bell took a first at Oxford before Oxford gave women degrees, climbed ten new Alpine routes in a single season, and in March 1921, in a Cairo hotel, picked Iraq's king.
The Girl Who Shot the Kaiser
In 1889, a five-foot Quaker in an ankle-length skirt asked the audience for a volunteer, and Kaiser Wilhelm II stood up.
The Emperor Made of Vegetables
What do you do when your court painter, a decorated cathedral man, starts rendering your jurist as a heap of raw poultry pinned around a syphilitic face?
The Best of Them
Her court priest kept a diary of what the widow queen of Jhansi did before breakfast, and the list begins with weightlifting.
The Dancer Who Toppled a King
What does a woman do after horsewhipping a Prussian gendarme, a Ballarat editor, and assembling a private army of law students?
The Woman Behind the Lattice
A Greek priest's daughter, taken by raiders at fourteen, spent the next forty-six years running the Ottoman Empire from behind a latticed screen above the Imperial Council.
The Reluctant Emperor
What kind of emperor reads fourteen languages, pays his own train fares, and orders a hundred telephones on the spot?
The Buckingham Palace Duel
At six, mid-reverse-bow out of Buckingham Palace, the Queen's poodle came for him — so he drew his sword.
The Queen's Poet
What do you do when a voice in your head orders you to write, the verse is catastrophic, and the Queen's polite rejection reads, to you, like a coronation?
The Almost-King of Albania
In 1920, an Albanian delegation walked into the League of Nations looking for a king and asked the nearest plausible Englishman.
The Empress and the File
What does a 19th-century empress do in a room called the Toilette- und Turnzimmer?