THE COURTIERS Splendor and Intrigue in the Georgian Court at Kensington Palace

Royal life is done up royally in Heather Wilds's expert narration of Worsley's stories of the courtiers who attended Britain's first Georgian kings. The circumstances that put a line of petty German monarchs onto the throne of England in the 1700s are droll enough, and the assembly of underlings who inhabited London's Kensington Palace-- and are commemorated in the portraits that hang there--are a showcase of eighteenth-century manners, notions, and styles, beautifully rendered here in prose and voice. Wilds's articulation is immaculate, and the narrative--often comical, more often sad--is a feast for the royalists among us. For the rest of us, it's sufficiently entertaining. D.A.W. [Published: JANUARY 2015]