Like making barrels or thatching roofs, writing about the royal family is one of the traditional craft skills of this country. It involves raking over yellowing newspaper cuttings and polishing old chestnuts about “majesty” and “radiance”. But books about the royals sell, including a recent clutch of glum ones, some ostensibly written by members of the family themselves, so they keep on coming. Just when you think you can’t face another one, a book appears that makes you wonder if you’ve ever read a proper account of the queen and her relations before. Paradoxically, it has taken a humorist, Craig Brown of the Daily Mail and Private Eye, a man who supposedly trades in throwaway wisecracks, to tell us something thought-provoking, perhaps even deep, about monarchy.
But before I praise him for what he’s written about the queen, I have to praise him for what he’s read about her first. He appears to have worked his way single-handedly through every book about Elizabeth II ever published, a phrase that very much begs the payoff: “So you don’t have to.” From The Little Princesses: The Intimate Story of HRH Princess Elizabeth and HRH Princess Margaret right the way through to Spare by Prince Harry, Brown has digested them all. It’s the sort of feat that might once have been witnessed in the ancient library of Alexandria, except that instead of poring over papyrus scrolls about gods and heroes, Brown has immersed himself in the life of a latter-day legend, as the queen appeared to her simpering chroniclers. He compares the experience to “wading through candyfloss: you emerge pink and queasy, but also undernourished”.
