The Family Firm is the first major historical analysis of the way Buckingham Palace worked with the Church of England and the media to initiate a new public relations strategy in the period 1932-53. It argues that the monarchy's deliberate elevation of a more informal and vulnerable family-centred image strengthened the emotional connections that members of the public forged with the royals, and that the tightening of these bonds had a unifying effect on national life in the unstable years during and either side of the Second World War.