Bedtime stories for young royalists

By Nicholas Barber

The Queen wakes up one morning in her bedroom in Buckingham Palace. There’s a knock at the door, and in walks a lady-in-waiting with Her Majesty’s breakfast on a tray. What neither of them realises is that a benign visitor is spying on them.

If you’ve read Roald Dahl’s “The BFG”, or seen Steven Spielberg’s recent film adaptation, you’ll know that the Big Friendly Giant hides in Buckingham Palace’s back garden, while his companion Sophie perches on the Queen’s window sill. But this scenario crops up again in a new children’s novel, “The Royal Rabbits of London”, by Santa Montefiore and Simon Sebag Montefiore, who are married and better known, respectively, for writing romantic novels and history books. In their version, an ancient order of rabbits protects the British royal family by patrolling a network of tunnels beneath the Palace, and peeking into it with periscopes.