لخّصلي

Like making barrels or thatching roofs, writing about the royal family is one of the traditional craft skills of this country.He compares the experience to "wading through candyfloss: you emerge pink and queasy, but also undernourished". It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it - and I mean that sincerely, because Brown has done us all a favour with his flamingo-coloured odyssey. The memoirs of courtiers, flunkies and hangers-on are among his primary sources, but his research extends to royal encounters recalled by politicians and celebrities. It's biography by crowdsourcing, you might say. It follows Brown's similar books about Princess Margaret and the Beatles, completing a triptych of 20th-century British portraits. The author is a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles and these end up furnishing a vivid and remarkably telling study of our late head of state, and even more so of the people she reigned over for 70 years. Was she a master of psychological jujitsu, turning the gaze of the outside world back upon itself? In 112 often short chapters, the many enjoyable vignettes include the efforts of the go-getting Labour minister Tony Benn to strike a blow for modern Britain by removing the queen's head from postage stamps. These don't quite climax with Benn's own head on a pikestaff, but the queen and her advisers silkily outmanoeuvre him. When Benn is promoted from postmaster general to minister of technology, he goes to be sworn in and she tells him: "I'm sure you'll miss your stamps."It involves raking over yellowing newspaper cuttings and polishing old chestnuts about "majesty" and "radiance".

Like making barrels or thatching roofs, writing about the royal family is one of the traditional craft skills of this country.He compares the experience to "wading through candyfloss: you emerge pink and queasy, but also undernourished". It's a tough job, but somebody's got to do it - and I mean that sincerely, because Brown has done us all a favour with his flamingo-coloured odyssey. The memoirs of courtiers, flunkies and hangers-on are among his primary sources, but his research extends to royal encounters recalled by politicians and celebrities. It's biography by crowdsourcing, you might say. It follows Brown's similar books about Princess Margaret and the Beatles, completing a triptych of 20th-century British portraits. The author is a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles and these end up furnishing a vivid and remarkably telling study of our late head of state, and even more so of the people she reigned over for 70 years. Was she a master of psychological jujitsu, turning the gaze of the outside world back upon itself? In 112 often short chapters, the many enjoyable vignettes include the efforts of the go-getting Labour minister Tony Benn to strike a blow for modern Britain by removing the queen's head from postage stamps. These don't quite climax with Benn's own head on a pikestaff, but the queen and her advisers silkily outmanoeuvre him. When Benn is promoted from postmaster general to minister of technology, he goes to be sworn in and she tells him: "I'm sure you'll miss your stamps."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."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.Brown doesn't dissent from the widely held view that the queen was sphinixlike.