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).

Brown’s aim is not to take apart the inner mechanisms of the queen herself – a dull woman of little imagination, limited interests, and no learning – but to lay bare her effect on her subjects. In this sense, the book is a case study of the need for monarchy. Was the queen, for example, human or superhuman? On the one hand, she was described by the Soviet General Secretary Nikita Khrushchev, who sat next to her at a banquet in 1956, as the ‘sort of young woman you’d be likely to meet walking along Gorky Street on a balmy summer afternoon’. On the other hand, anxiety about meeting her could cause spontaneous defecation. But the royals, Prince Harry explains in Spare (2023), are (like pandas) just as afraid of us. ‘The thing you must realise about the Royal Family is that they live in a constant state of fear … Fear of the public. Fear of the future. Fear of the day the nation would say: OK shut it down.’