BIOGRAPHY A Voyage Around the Queen Craig Brown Fourth Estate, $37.99 Craig Brown’s A Voyage Around the Queen is a marvellous book. It makes for a weirdly enchanting sense of the late Elizabeth II without diminishing the sense of how much she was bound by convention, how much the world was circumscribed by the polite question, and how much she was capable of reducing to a quivering heap the most self-possessed people.
The British novelist Kingsley Amis, for example, was worried he’d fart in her presence. The Queen was praised for her Platinum Jubilee skit with Paddington Bear, which included her revealing where she kept an emergency marmalade sandwich. Credit: While Brown’s title recalls John Mortimer’s play about his father, his epigraph comes from the great Viennese modernist, Robert Musil: “One does what one is; one becomes what one does?” It means that Brown has given us a portrait of the Queen via the stories we have about her.
Brown is known for his satirical work in Private Eye magazine , but his most recent books are two acclaimed biographies: Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret , and One, Two, Three, Four: The Beatles in Time , both written in his now familiar short chapters through which the voyage results in a fully convincing portrait. He must have read a vast number of books and sources about the Queen and quotes from them with abandon. Brown’s research included a vast number of books.
Credit: On the coronation in June 1953 we have: �.