Q: A Voyage Around the Queen

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR
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Virginia Woolf compared her to a caterpillar; Anne Frank kept pictures of her on the wall of the Secret Annex; Jimi Hendrix played her tune; Haile Selassie gave her a gold tiara; Dirk Bogarde watched Death in Venice with her; Andy Warhol envied her fame; Donald Trump offended her; E. M. Forster confessed he would have married her, if only she had been a boy.

Queen Elizabeth II was famous for longer than anyone who has ever lived. When people spoke of her, they spoke of themselves; when they dreamed of her, they dreamed of themselves. She mirrored their hopes and anxieties. To the optimist, she seemed an optimist; to the pessimist, a pessimist; to the awestruck, charismatic; and to the cynical, humdrum. Though by nature reserved and unassuming, her presence in a room could make presidents, tycoons, and rock stars turn back into the nervous children they once were. For close to a century, she inhabited the psyche of the world.

Combining biography, essay, cultural history, dream diary, travelog, and satire, Craig Brown--the bestselling and award-winning author of Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret and Hello Goodbye Hello--presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of this most public yet most private of sovereigns in Q: A Voyage Around the Queen.

Craig Brown is the author of 150 Glimpses of the Beatles, which was awarded the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, the winner of the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His first article appeared in the New Statesman in 1978. Since then, he has written for many newspapers and magazines, including The Guardian, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and The Spectator. He has written the parodic celebrity diary for Private Eye for more than thirty years. He lives in Suffolk and Bloomsbury with his wife, Frances Welch; they have two children and a grandchild.