Worsley was the chief curator of Britain’s Historic Royal Palaces for more than two decades and thus has a unique frame of reference on her subject. A political, social, and royal history, her book is braided with personal anecdotes. She recounts stories of the palaces’ “human inhabitants, all of them, high and low,” and she relates her own experiences, pointing out telling details in the rooms they haunted. She is an accomplished writer, her confiding, conversational style honed through speaking, her lexicon accommodating “somnolence,” or “meretricious,” as well as “control-freak.” A hefty portion of the book centers on the Tudors, especially Henry VIII, from his childhood as “an unstable compound of bravado and grief”; through his tumultuous reign; his favor-currying builder, Cardinal Wolsey; and his succession of wives. Part Two moves from Hampton Court to the Tower of London, its ravens, tragic boy princes, and other inhabitants. The Stuarts follow, from James I, a “tricksy, slippery kind of king”; then the Hanoverians (father-son conflict; the madness of George III); Victoria (admired and pitied); and finally, the modern monarchs, from vain “Bertie” to Elizabeth II. Worsley is especially adept at providing a different perspective on the queens, correcting popular misperceptions, and humanizing them—for example, in the strikingly sympathetic double-portrait of George II’s queen and his mistress. The author seeks out formerly overlooked evidence of female agency and accepts the possibility—without certainty—of homosexual inclinations. Her lively account pushes against cinematic dramatizations, chasing through the archives as well as stalking the halls. Marriages and illnesses, human relations and foibles, clothing, furnishings, food, portraits, horses, hangers-on, and more provide a constant stream of engaging you-are-there vignettes—all animating history.