The sine qua non of any reference book, however frivolous, is accuracy. Unfortunately, the latest instalment of the Almanach, which purports to document those families that aren’t quite royal but are still pretty grand, is perhaps the most laughably sloppy product of its kind ever to have been published. It used, in the old days, to be in French. Now it is in English, albeit the English of someone apparently in desperate need of both a dictionary and a spell-check function on his PC.