Kenneth Rose


Kenneth Vivian Rose was a journalist and royal biographer in the United Kingdom. The son of Ada and Jacob Rosenwige, a Bradford Jewish surgeon, Rose was educated at Repton and New College, Oxford. He served in the Welsh Guards 1943-6 and was attached to Phantom, 1945. He did a brief spell of teaching as an Assistant Master at Eton College, 1948. His journalistic career began when he joined the Editorial Staff of the
Daily Telegraph, a position he held from 1952 to 1960. He founded and wrote the Albany Column, 1961–97, for the Sunday Telegraph.
Rose was an award-winning writer, having won the prestigious Whitbread Book Award in the biography category in 1983 for his book, King George V. He shared that award with Victoria Glendinning, who won for her book Vita. He was appointed CBE in the 1997 New Year Honours.
In April 2005, days before the wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, a British tabloid published that the couple were related, as ninth cousins, by way of the 2nd Duke of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Rose said that, although the apparent familiarity between the two was not well established, a family connection was "perfectly factible".
Two well-regarded volumes of Rose's journals edited by DR Thorpe were published in 2018 and 2019. A review in The Spectator by distinguished biographer Philip Ziegler said: 'He was, of course, a snob — nobody could write a social column in the Sunday Telegraph for more than 50 years without some snobbish instincts — but he was an intelligent one, singularly well-informed, and capable from time to time of administering a sharp bite to the noble hands that fed him his material. It might reasonably be said that his contribution to social history is limited in its parameters, but it is a real contribution for all that. It is also great fun to read'.

Selected works