Books on Britannia

 

    Visiting the royal yacht Britannia yesterday I spotted this small collection of books in a passageway in the crew's quarters. They include a number of novels with a nautical or military theme - Hemingway, Bernard Cornwell, quite a bit of crime such as P.D. James, Ruth Rendell and Michael Innes; Evelyn Waugh is represented by Brideshead Revisited and Men at Arms and Hardy by Far from the Madding Crowd, then there's Olivia Manning's Fortunes of War, M.M. Kaye's The Far Pavilions, Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago (click there to see a very attractive new cover), and Linda Gillard's Emotional Geology.

 

    No books (not even this one) were visible in the Queen's rooms, but here in Prince Philip's cabin we can see a couple of sailing manuals.

 

    Music-wise, the grand piano in the State Drawing Room (once played by Noël Coward) had, appropriately, a copy of Rule Britannia open on the music stand.