Thank you, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, for encapsulating some of my confused feelings about my country (“When we asked the Queen to tea with Paddington, something magic happened – the most lovely goodbye”, Comment). It’s been years since I stood for or sang the national anthem and I was sick of all the oleaginous twaddle about Elizabeth II before it even started. Yet I love the union jack (while tending to dislike people who love it) and I’m a patriot (while often detesting patriots). Cottrell-Boyce’s final line is wonderful: “I’m thankful for the way she used the peculiar power of her archaic role to allow us to glimpse, however fleetingly, that we share something good and that we need to defend that.”
Antony Hay
London SW17
I am no royalist, not even British. Nor was I born before, during or immediately after the Second World War, but it couldn’t have been said better: the death of the Queen feels huge for exactly the reason Frank Cottrell-Boyce points out: with her died the last Zeitzeuge of a time when humans were determined to build better societies, here and in most of Europe.
Anette Magnussen
London E3
