Books: “Q: A Voyage Around the Queen” by Craig Brown

Attention, fellow Anglophiles: just how much did you enjoy “The Crown?” Was “Downton Abbey” your cup of tea? If you answered yes to both of the above, then stand not upon the order of going but buy Brown’s new book, “Q: A Voyage Around the Queen” at once. It delves, in a very different way, into the life of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.

More bio-adjacent than bio, the book is unstuffy, eccentric, and LOL-funny. One chapter reports on the strange dreams that celebrities like Picasso and Kingsley Amis have had about Her Majesty. When these dreams are revealed in person to the Queen, she isn’t the least bit embarrassed. “I’ve heard them all,” she replies nonchalantly.

Brown also digs deep into the youthful Queen’s 1953 coronation, which attracted millions of TV viewers across England and her colonies. These fans included an 11-year-old from Liverpool named Paul McCartney; an 8-year-old girl who would became famous as the singer Lulu (“To Sir with Love”); and a young American reporter named Jacqueline Bouvier. Among the thousands of wedding gifts Elizabeth and Prince Philip received that year were a grand piano from the RAF and 500 cans of tinned pineapple from the government of Queensland.

As PM David Cameron once remarked, the Queen met over 4 million different people over the course of her lifetime. As she could not be expected to know everything about each of them, her typical response in conversation was “how interesting.” Those who met her were often just as tongue-tied as she was, and they suffered what was called the “Royal Effect:” nervousness about what they would say and fear of misspeaking. In fact, they often did misspeak.

As part of her royal duties, the Queen was sometimes called upon to entertain those who were not her cup of tea. These included Uganda’s Idi Amin, Romania’s Nicolae Ceaușescu, as well as Donald Trump, whom she thought rude. Then there were those who found Her Majesty insufferable, including Labor MP Tony Benn and American politician Lyndon Larouche who claimed, among other things, that the Queen was an alien from outer space.

Mixed in are anecdotes about other members of the Royal Family—from renegades like Princess Margaret and Prince Harry, to starchy old bigots like The Duke of Edinburgh. When the Duke was introduced to a young man who had just returned from New Guinea, he asked him, quite seriously, “and you managed not to get eaten?”

Some of the anecdotes in “Q” were dramatized in “The Crown” as well as in the 2006 film “The Queen” starring Helen Mirren. But nobody has provided a backstory as witty, smart, and well-researched as Brown, who has written for the Guardian, Vanity Fair, and the satirical magazine Private Eye. Buy yourself a copy of the book and give another to your Anglophile friend. They’ll be your humble servant forever.

Like this review? Follow me at “What Does Aug Think?” acsntn.substack.com. Thank you!