They tend to be civil servants, often diplomats drawn from the Foreign Office, who may be very pleasant, intelligent people, but once they get inside the Palace they're riveted to the status quo and they lose track of public opinion in the real world.

When he was a Whitbread Prize judge in 2000 he said it would have been a "national humiliation" if Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban had won ahead of Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf. He is also President of the UK Poker Federation. Holden's papers are collected at Boston University's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.

In 2009 he was elected the first President of the International Federation of Poker (IFP) whose declared aim is to win poker legal recognition as a skilled 'mind-sport'. He has also publiAnthony Holdend translations of opera and Ancient Greek poetry as well as several autobiographical books about poker. Anthony Holden (born 22 May 1947) is an English writer broadcaster and critic particularly known as a biographer of artists including Shakespeare Tchaikovsky Leigh Hunt Lorenzo da Ponte and Laurence Olivier and of members of the British Royal family notably Charles Prince of Wales.