Queen Marie of Roumania died in 1938 at the age of 62, sadly just missing the television age which I think she would have loved. She would have been wonderfully indiscreet at press conferences and on chat shows for, as she admitted in the preface to her autobiography, ‘all my life I have been almost dangerously sincere’.

I believe, too, that she would have adored ‘Dallas’ and ‘Dynasty’, seeing in them a pale reflection of her own life which was more improbably romantic and exaggeratedly dramatic than any soap opera. (Come to think of it, I find it strange no one has done a mini series on her life).

Marie, known to her myriad relations scattered across the courts of Europe as Missy, was a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria and of Tzar Alexander II. During her life she saw the map of Europe redrawn several times as the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires collapsed and Russia exchanged one type of