A Voyage Around the Queen: This biography of Elizabeth II is an unusual masterpiece

Elizabeth II's whole life is covered chronologically through thematic chapters in A Voyage Around the Queen. Photo / Getty Images

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.

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 who, 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 Ceausescu’s knighthood the day before his death and Mussolini’s after Italy declared war.

This is not the sort of book to discuss the Queen’s constitutional role theoretically, but we learn that Prince Philip’s mother’s father had a dragon tattoo stretching from his chest to his legs. As for the Prince’s quips, they benefited from the right audience. He once asked Joan Walley, a sincere left-ish feminist MP, “Where do you represent?” “Stoke,” she replied. “Ghastly place, isn’t it?” he said. In a list for a periodical of his 14 “most ugsome words”, Prince Philip included, along with nihilism, charismatic, gay and conurbation, the tricky term camp. Because Craig Brown delights in bit parts for Isobel Barnett, Gerald Nabarro, Dorothy Squires, Lulu, David Starkey, Antony Armstrong-Jones and Norman Wisdom, it is clear that the concept of camp is not entirely ugsome to him even before he devotes a chapter to it.

A side to the late Queen went beyond the Eeyorish. Photo / Getty Images

All the more powerful, then, are sudden eruptions of violence: the evisceration of a corgi; wounds inflicted by the IRA bomb that killed Lord Mountbatten; the author’s grandfather shooting himself in the stomach at the dinner table, declaring: “Now look what you’ve made me do.” A technique used by the fiction writer Flannery O’Connor, this mustn’t be done too frequently. It’s not overdone here.

But amid the dullness of royal duties — “Have you come far?” — the surgeon David Nott tells a different story. Just back from volunteer work as a surgeon in Aleppo amid scenes too terrible to detail, he was invited to a lunch with the Queen for eminent people and found when he tried to reply to her that his bottom lip quivered and he couldn’t say a word. She asked: “Shall I help you?” She talked about her corgis, and biscuits were brought and they fed them and stroked them for half an hour. “She did it because she knew I was seriously traumatised. The humanity of what she was doing was unbelievable.”

A side to the late Queen went beyond the Eeyorish. At the beacon lighting for her silver jubilee, the Army officer in charge confided: “Ma’am, I have to say that absolutely everything that could possibly go wrong is going wrong.” “Oh, good,” she replied. “What fun!”

Craig Brown chooses as a striking image of Elizabeth II’s reign the photograph of her alone in a black Covid mask in the stalls at Windsor Castle for the funeral of the husband she had met 87 years earlier. And how could the nation thank her for her life of duty? Through a computer-generated Peruvian bear called Paddington, it seemed. In the last year of her life, too frail to attend the thanksgiving service for her platinum jubilee at St Paul’s, she had some footage in the can. “Happy jubilee, Ma’am,” said Paddington. “And… thank you. For everything.” The Queen replied, smiling: “That’s very kind.”