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“No one in human history lived a more chronicled life than the Queen,” Craig Brown writes in the opening pages of A Voyage Around the Queen, his biography of the woman who became Elizabeth II. It’s possible, Brown says, to “chart her movements, on an almost daily basis, from the moment she was born to the moment she died”. She barely went a week of her 96 years without being photographed, and those photographs then being disseminated around the globe. But despite the sheer volume of pictures and press snippets, she remained almost entirely inscrutable: she kept her true self hidden and set the blueprint for what we’ve come to think of as royal image management in the process (a blueprint that some of her descendants have ripped up).
