Robert Graves, seldom a shrinking violet, on receiving the late Queen’s Medal for Poetry, in person, aged 73, gave her a metaphorical score of 10: “You’ve done it beautifully, my dear.” Emboldened by her laughter, he informed her that they were both descended, via Edward IV, from the Prophet Mohammed, and suggested that she might mention this next Christmas, for the benefit of her Muslim subjects.
Lord Weinstock, swimming one day with Lord Wyatt, mentioned that the Queen didn’t eat shellfish. “That is probably because of her Jewish ancestry, Prince Albert being the son of his mother and a Jewish music master,” replied Wyatt, who was the “Voice of Reason” in The News of the World for many years.
In this fat, funny, fact-filled biography of Elizabeth II, Craig Brown notes that more is discoverable about her life day by day than about his mother’s, or his own. He calls his method, already triumphantly deployed on the Beatles and Princess Margaret, a kaleidoscope or scatter-gun, but it is more like a mosaic. If some tesserae are ill-shapen or just fragments of broken mirror, a picture emerges through the skill of the mosaicist.
I enjoyed A Voyage Around the Queen so much that I wished it were longer than its 672 pages. The whole life is covered chronologically through thematic chapters. One, on who curtsies to whom, contains this surprising remark from Princess Margaret about her grandmother: “I detested Queen Mary. Of course, she had an inferiority complex. We were Royal and she was not.” It was a matter of birth.
The hand-woven tablecloth given by Mahatma Gandhi as a wedding-present to her other granddaughter was mistaken by Queen Mary for one of his celebrated loincloths: “Such an indelicate object – what a horrible thing!” Mistaken identity, however, could not often have been experienced by Jeannette Charles (1927-2024) in a career as a lookalike. She resembled the Queen only “as she might appear in a bad dream”, Brown judges, launching into a cheering chapter on the Queen in dreams.
As for the interpretation of dreams, here comes Lucian Freud in a chapter on the Queen’s sittings for his portrait, and Rolf Harris in a chapter on his. Both say even more about the artists than about the Queen. Only Rolf Harris had his honour, a CBE, revoked – like Nicolae Ceaușescu’s knighthood the day before his death and Mussolini’s after Italy declared war.
Thank you for your sharing. I am worried that I lack creative ideas. It is your article that makes me full of hope. Thank you. But, I have a question, can you help me?