The ‘No Kings’ movement reminds us that monarchies, actual or quasi, have never been secure. In the past 150 years, Spain has had two republics as well as two dictatorships and various forms of royal exile. The British have long been familiar with the crown’s hollowness – and even with regicide. As James Shirley wrote after the execution of Charles I, ‘Sceptre and Crown/ Must tumble down,/ And in the dust be equal made/ With the poor crooked scythe and spade.’

For this reason among others, and in more than one sense, titles matter in royal biographies. Sir Paul Preston’s thorough, lucid and fair-minded life of Spain’s then-king, Juan Carlos, first appeared in 2003 in Spanish. Its subtitle, El Rey de un pueblo, ‘A People’s King’, was repeated in the 2004 English version but was changed, both in the US edition and for the international paperback, to the more cautious (and accurate) Steering Spain from Dictatorship to Democracy. Already, anti-colonial feeling in South America, combined with the republicanism of Spain’s ruling PSOE (Socialist Workers’ Party), had weakened the King’s authority. There were  allegations of dodgy financial dealings including tax evasion, and not everyone took his philandering lightly. In June 2014, he promised to step down, handing over to his son Felipe a few weeks later.

Preston has now revised and extended the narrative in what his publishers are treating as an entirely new book, Downfall of a King: Juan Carlos of Spain. While the first two thirds are pretty much the same as before, it incorporates subsequent research by Preston and others – the excellent