Craig Brown

A Voyage Around the Queen begins with the announcement in the London Gazette on 21 April 1926 of the birth of Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, and ends with a minute-by-minute account of the goings-on in Balmoral on 8 September 2022, Elizabeth II’s last day on earth. The 650 pages in between document the main events of the queen’s life, but the book is not a biography. As with Craig Brown’s earlier Ma’am Darling: 99 glimpses of Princess Margaret (2017) and One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles in time (2020), what he has put together is closer to mass observation, but it might also be filed under anthropology (‘the whole institution’, said David Attenborough ‘depends on mysticism and the tribal chief in his hut’), psychology (she was ‘the Queen of the British psyche’, says Brian Masters), or even zoology (Virginia Woolf, Hilary Mantel, and Prince Harry have each, independently, compared the royal family to pandas in captivity).

Chapter 148 of Craig Brown’s engrossing book is speculative fiction. Gerry and the Pacemakers are ‘the most successful pop group of the twentieth century’, their 1963 recording of ‘How Do You Do It?’, which the Beatles turned down, having launched their career. ‘To this day,’ Brown writes, ‘they remain the only artists to have achieved the number one slot with each of their first three singles.’ The last bit is almost true: they held that record for two decades.

My earliest memory of Princess Margaret is flicking through my grandmother’s copy of 'The Australian Women’s Weekly' and seeing photographs of a middle-aged woman, in huge sunglasses and a colourful kaftan, on a tropical island. I surmised she was famous but did not know why. My grandmother explained ...