REVIEW A Voyage Around the Queen , the latest in Craig Brown’s series of fragmentary biographies, teems with facts, humour and intelligence. 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 they were both descended, via Edward IV, from the Prophet Mohammed, and suggested 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 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 scattergun, but it is more like a mosaic. If some tesserae are ill-shapen or just fragments of a broken mirror, a picture emerges through the skill of the mosaicist..