Queen Camilla has offered a charming glimpse into her evening routine with the King, revealing that the couple enjoy reading together before dinner.
In a new BBC Arts documentary, The Book That Changed My Life, set to be broadcast on BBC Two and iPlayer on Wednesday, October 14, the Queen describes how the King is particularly fond of biographies.
“I occasionally, when I’m deep in a book, hear him roaring with laughter about something,” she says. “It’s very off-putting. I can’t get back into my book.”
She said that “it’s a lovely quiet time”, adding: “I think it would be a complete and utter tragedy if books went forever”.
The Queen said the King loves reading biographies and will ‘roar’ with laughter occasionally when they read before dinner
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The programme sees Camilla explore what she calls the “transformative power” of literature, sitting down with four individuals whose lives have been profoundly shaped by reading. She describes the experience as “one of the most unusual book club meetings I have ever attended.”
Reading, the Queen declares, is “like the best tonic in the world.”
Camilla traces her passion for literature back to her earliest years, when her father began reading aloud to her and her siblings. “We must’ve been very, very young when my father started reading to us,” she recalls. “I think that’s where my love of reading came from.”
The family worked their way through beloved classics such as Treasure Island and Peter Pan, experiences the Queen credits with transporting them “into all sorts of other worlds.”
Camilla made the comments in the BBC Arts programme The Book That Changed My Life, which is due to air this week
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Having left school at a relatively young age, Camilla regards books as the foundation of her learning. “I left school quite young, so I think reading has been most of my education,” she explains.
She is emphatic about the value of introducing children to literature as early as possible. “You learn so much about people, about life,” she says. “I think people who don’t read miss out so much.”
Among the documentary’s most poignant moments is Camilla’s account of her late father, Major Bruce Shand, a decorated World War Two officer who served as a 12th Lancer alongside the Desert Rats. Wounded by a sniper’s bullet that passed through his face, miraculously missing his tongue and teeth, he was captured in North Africa and held in a German prisoner of war camp for two and a half years.
It was during that captivity that reading became his lifeline. “He said he educated himself because he read every single book, from the bible to the encyclopaedia, whatever was there; he just sat all day long and read, read, read, and that’s, I think, how he survived it,” the Queen recounts.
Like many of his generation, Major Shand never spoke of his wartime ordeals, instead committing his experiences to a memoir, Previous Engagements. “I cried through most of it,” Camilla admits. “I found it so moving, because I didn’t know anything about it.”
The documentary brings together four people from strikingly different backgrounds, each of whom found salvation in the written word.
Among them is Ian Kirby from Gateshead, who spiralled into severe depression following a traumatic incident at his home. His path to recovery began when he joined a local book club and discovered the autobiography of Glenn McCrory, the Tyneside boxing champion, whose story gave him a fresh perspective on his own struggles.
Mr Kirby now considers himself to be living a rich and fulfilled existence, with literature at the core of his turnaround. “That is the beauty of a book,” he says in the programme. “It can give you experiences you’ve never experienced, but they can also be an inspiration.”
Alongside Mr Kirby, Camilla meets a former prisoner, a lorry driver and the owner of a roadside café, each with their own remarkable story of how a book altered their trajectory.
In a message delivered at a preview screening this week, the Queen spoke of her conviction that books represent “the very best form of escapism, transporting us to other places and into other lives, other hearts and minds in ways that greatly enhance our own.” She said literature had “certainly enriched my own life beyond measure.”
Camilla also highlighted the Queen’s Reading Room, an online platform she established five years ago to nurture a lasting love of literature among both adults and children, and to connect people with “that special magic that can only be found in the leaves of a book.”
Her “fondest hope,” she said, is that the documentary will build upon that initiative by showing audiences worldwide the difference reading has made to people who have faced personal adversity.
The Queen concluded the programme with a simple declaration: “Books change people’s lives.”