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4.0 AVERAGE
4.0 AVERAGE
funny
informative
lighthearted
reflective
slow-paced
I’ve never liked the British royal family and have long believed that the world would be better off without it.
Nobody should be allowed to pretend that they are somehow better than anyone else just because their ancestors stole land from peasants.
However I was fascinated by the late queen Elizabeth who performed her archaic role for so many decades.
She was the most photographed woman in history, a 20th Century icon who also symbolised an older age.
Craig Brown’s portrait of her “A Voyage Around the Queen” is the definitive biography. Brown is not a lick-spittle “royal correspondent” he is known for his humorous writing in Private Eye. He also seems to have researched his subject exhaustively and the result is extremely funny, and also profound.
In its pages he charts the bloodlines of her corgis, and chronicles their savagery and also tells of the dreams the famous have had of the queen and the impact she had on the famous and the powerful.
It is a big read, but great fun.
Nobody should be allowed to pretend that they are somehow better than anyone else just because their ancestors stole land from peasants.
However I was fascinated by the late queen Elizabeth who performed her archaic role for so many decades.
She was the most photographed woman in history, a 20th Century icon who also symbolised an older age.
Craig Brown’s portrait of her “A Voyage Around the Queen” is the definitive biography. Brown is not a lick-spittle “royal correspondent” he is known for his humorous writing in Private Eye. He also seems to have researched his subject exhaustively and the result is extremely funny, and also profound.
In its pages he charts the bloodlines of her corgis, and chronicles their savagery and also tells of the dreams the famous have had of the queen and the impact she had on the famous and the powerful.
It is a big read, but great fun.
informative
inspiring
reflective
I haven't read other book by this author, which seems to make me an outlier of readers here. I enjoyed the way we circled the Queen in looking at her life, taking notes from the people around her and news and culture tidbits related to the Queen to show how her life was observed. It seems like maybe the only way to write a big book about her, as she was little more than her position as far as anyone can tell. She liked her dogs and horses and had no personality beyond that. She found conversation difficult and never offered solid opinions on anything. It is both hard to believe and entirely understandable that she became so void as a person so that the nation could see themselves reflected there instead.
emotional
funny
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
reflective
medium-paced
emotional
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced
funny
informative
inspiring
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
funny
informative
medium-paced
Not a typical royal biography. More sociology, and a little weird, but well worth it.
“This is how we relate to the royal family: we like to recognise our own lives in theirs, just as we recognise human faces in clouds or smoke.” Reading too many biographies of the royal family, one after another, is like wading through candy floss, says Craig Brown, one emerges pink and sickly but also undernourished. Fear not, for our leading parodist has done it for us and what we have in A Voyage Around The Queen is not so much an aggregate of biographies but a multitude of other people’s opinions, views, beliefs and fantasies about our longest-reigning monarch.
From the unctuously obvious (William Shawcross, Hugo Vickers, Stephen Fry) and the wilfully opposed (Tony Benn) to the nowadays obscure (Malcolm Muggeridge, Chips Channon, Woodrow Wyatt), not forgetting the sad superannuated courtiers (Lady Anne Glenconner), the disgraced and disgraceful (Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall and various other Operation Yewtree targets) and the frankly deranged (Sarah Ferguson employing a pet psychic for the late Queen’s bereaved corgis).
Everything is here: terrible poetry, hideous art; there’s a guide to speaking like her late Majesty, should you wish to (‘rotherham pressiv’ - somewhat admirable; ‘sairviss’ - assistance, ‘a life of sairviss’; ‘orf’- not orn; ‘orn’ - not orff; ‘orphan’ - frequent; that sort of thing); a parade of politicians, film stars, ordinary folk and minor royals (and Fergie) making utter fools of themselves. Even Jeanette Charles, whom I’d always assumed was just a silly woman who looked a bit like the Queen if you were pissed, and popped up with irritating frequency on telly in the 70s and 80s when the Goodies or Freddie Starr wanted the monarch doing something incongruously mundane like putting out her empty milk bottles or operating a cement mixer - but no, a serious actress apparently, drama school and everything, but couldn’t get the work due to “the resemblance”, and decided to join rather than beat ‘em. She used to stand in at dress rehearsals for official functions and military ceremonies, although that can’t have been as disconcerting as the burly NCO who once had to put on a frock and handbag and pretend to be the Princess Royal in advance of her visit to a particularly windy military base, to ensure that there wouldn’t be any risk of a tabloid exposé.
Mostly what it reflects is monarchy as tabula rasa - there’s nothing there so we project on to them what we will. Or queue in the autumn air for 55 hours to file past a catafalque (which Brown notes is an ironic as well as very British tribute, since the Queen never queued for anything in her life. As a small boy for whom mummy was viewed as equivalent to today’s Wikipedia*, I once asked her where the Queen got her clothes from. She wasn’t a particular royalist. “Perhaps she pops out to C&A.” *encyclopaedic but occcasionally factually a bit dodgy.
A Voyage Around The Queen includes two personal episodes from Brown which show even the most objective of enquirers somehow being swept up in this lantern show, even after Elizabeth had died. In one, he visits Sandringham on an “exclusive tour with afternoon tea in the royal sitting room” - so exclusive anyone can pay £85 to join; and in another, finds himself in an Essex auction house for a sale of royal memorabilia and almost purchasing a slice of authentic cake (in its original box) from the wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips in 1973, a marriage which ended in divorce and is now remembered only by obsessives.
The book comes with an added bonus - a snakes and ladders game in the endpapers - see if you can guess which of these events in her long and regal life is a snake and which a ladder: starts waving and shaking hands; Uncle David abdicates, now second in line to the throne; corgi takes on Princess Anne’s bull terrier, loses; hides behind tree to dodge Ceacescu; It’s A Royal Knockout.
This really is fun for all the royal family! ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
From the unctuously obvious (William Shawcross, Hugo Vickers, Stephen Fry) and the wilfully opposed (Tony Benn) to the nowadays obscure (Malcolm Muggeridge, Chips Channon, Woodrow Wyatt), not forgetting the sad superannuated courtiers (Lady Anne Glenconner), the disgraced and disgraceful (Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall and various other Operation Yewtree targets) and the frankly deranged (Sarah Ferguson employing a pet psychic for the late Queen’s bereaved corgis).
Everything is here: terrible poetry, hideous art; there’s a guide to speaking like her late Majesty, should you wish to (‘rotherham pressiv’ - somewhat admirable; ‘sairviss’ - assistance, ‘a life of sairviss’; ‘orf’- not orn; ‘orn’ - not orff; ‘orphan’ - frequent; that sort of thing); a parade of politicians, film stars, ordinary folk and minor royals (and Fergie) making utter fools of themselves. Even Jeanette Charles, whom I’d always assumed was just a silly woman who looked a bit like the Queen if you were pissed, and popped up with irritating frequency on telly in the 70s and 80s when the Goodies or Freddie Starr wanted the monarch doing something incongruously mundane like putting out her empty milk bottles or operating a cement mixer - but no, a serious actress apparently, drama school and everything, but couldn’t get the work due to “the resemblance”, and decided to join rather than beat ‘em. She used to stand in at dress rehearsals for official functions and military ceremonies, although that can’t have been as disconcerting as the burly NCO who once had to put on a frock and handbag and pretend to be the Princess Royal in advance of her visit to a particularly windy military base, to ensure that there wouldn’t be any risk of a tabloid exposé.
Mostly what it reflects is monarchy as tabula rasa - there’s nothing there so we project on to them what we will. Or queue in the autumn air for 55 hours to file past a catafalque (which Brown notes is an ironic as well as very British tribute, since the Queen never queued for anything in her life. As a small boy for whom mummy was viewed as equivalent to today’s Wikipedia*, I once asked her where the Queen got her clothes from. She wasn’t a particular royalist. “Perhaps she pops out to C&A.” *encyclopaedic but occcasionally factually a bit dodgy.
A Voyage Around The Queen includes two personal episodes from Brown which show even the most objective of enquirers somehow being swept up in this lantern show, even after Elizabeth had died. In one, he visits Sandringham on an “exclusive tour with afternoon tea in the royal sitting room” - so exclusive anyone can pay £85 to join; and in another, finds himself in an Essex auction house for a sale of royal memorabilia and almost purchasing a slice of authentic cake (in its original box) from the wedding of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips in 1973, a marriage which ended in divorce and is now remembered only by obsessives.
The book comes with an added bonus - a snakes and ladders game in the endpapers - see if you can guess which of these events in her long and regal life is a snake and which a ladder: starts waving and shaking hands; Uncle David abdicates, now second in line to the throne; corgi takes on Princess Anne’s bull terrier, loses; hides behind tree to dodge Ceacescu; It’s A Royal Knockout.
This really is fun for all the royal family! ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆
A very informative and also very cleverly humorous book. As a longtime royal watcher, I learned a lot I didn’t know about the Queen and royal family. I miss her.