Recent content by ficciones

Joining this discussion rather late in the game, but I'd like to add my rather pragmatic viewpoint. So here's my macrolevel take. The way I figure, the divorce was nobody's fault. Charles must have regarded his marriage as arranged -- the onerous restrictions on whom he could marry eliminated...

A guide to Stockholm with a diagram of the palace says that the family's apartments are in the west wing facing the formal gardens, not the lake.

I suppose it depends what ones sisters are like -- in my case they are terrific fun. Wouldn't trade them for the world. :heart:

Sort of a wacky story, but this is from an American gossip column: Tempers flared at Robert Wilson and Louis Vuitton’s Watermill Center benefit. We’re told that Jaime de Marichalar, the king of Spain’s son-in-law, verbally assaulted two artists-in-residence, Cuban natives Damian Aquiles and...

Just me, but I think the dress is great and perfectly appropriate for a teenager who seems to have an elegant look.

Lyonnaise is correct that Monaco's official language is French. (Italian and English are common, as is Monegasque, which is a local dialect...lots of languages for two square kilometers...) Albert sounds very American when he speaks English. Stephanie's accent is not so definitively American...

Not just "Tamara Drax," according to Reuters -- she's consistently referred to as "Pretty Tamara Drax" ;) Thank god she isn't ugly...

I was in the Jaguar box at the Montreal Grand Prix last year and sat next to Peter Phillips during the race. (He was working with the Jaguar team.) Very much one of the guys, and I was impressed that his mobile number was listed along with everyone else's on a contact sheet.

That black suit of Princess Lilian's is impressive -- what a chic outfit for an elderly woman. Gotta love it.

Judging by her smile it appears that Queen Margrethe might be an absolutely delightful woman. Does anyone know what her personality is like?

Ah, good to hear that they are using Testino. His shot of Nicole Kidman for the cover of Vanity Fair a few months ago was breathtaking. It's amazing what a difference a talented photographer can make.

I was looking at photos from Christmas of the Norwegian royal family and it got me to thinking about the snapshot-like "semi-official" photographs coming from the Norwegians and the Danish in particular. They're not always terrible, but the British and the Swedish families, for instance, seem to...

Benn is right that there were speculations about Queen Victoria being fathered by a Irishman -- whom I want to say was called Sir John Conroy. Something like that. The book was published last year and the author's evidence was to do with the lack of hemophilia (and also porphyria?) in Victoria's...

The book -- especially with a claim like Caroline now outranking her siblings -- must have been fact-checked. Probably a reliable source. It's all enough to make one dizzy, no?

I read the interview, and honestly it wasn't all that in-depth. It's a Q & A with maybe ten questions altogether. She says that she isn't much of a cook (but that she loves food), that short winter days are still hard for her even though she has lived in Sweden all of her life, and that she...