As a child, I had, as all children should, a maiden aunt. To be accurate, she wasn’t really an aunt but she was certainly a maiden, kissed only once, on Christmas Day, by an Indian doctor during her short spell nursing. Not unreasonably, since she was born in her reign, one of her favourite reads was the diaries of Queen Victoria. Perhaps by association, I have always imagined these diaries to be about as racy The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady, which was a bestseller back in the 1970s and no doubt a gift poor Aunt Ethel received several times. But now I know differently. Far from concentrating on her reign’s floral particulars, these were the journals of a randy bird who couldn’t get enough of it.

Mind you, the monarch’s sex life lost nothing in its telling on Channel 4′s Queen Victoria’s Men. Even

Jamie Byng, managing director of Canongate Publishing, who brought The Audacity of Hope and Dreams From My Father to Britain last year, ordered an extra 120,000 copies of the books on hearing the presidential result yesterday.

Canongate had already printed 300,000 copies, but since sales at some book chains doubled this week, Mr Byng now expects to have ordered at least half a million by the end of the year.

The publisher