The Diamond Queen by Andrew Marr

‘Of making many books there is no end’, particularly when the subject is Queen Elizabeth II. It is less than ten years since Ben Pimlott and Sarah Bradford independently produced authoritative and excellent biography-centred books on the Queen. Since then a fair number of minor studies have appeared. Can enough have happened in the meantime, can enough new information have been revealed, to justify two new books?

The answer, rather surprisingly, is a cautious ‘yes’. Both Andrew Marr and Robert Hardman are serious students of their subject. Both write well and thoughtfully. Neither offers sensational revelations — just as well, since it seems unlikely that there is anything sensational to reveal — but both books contain a lot of information which will be new to any but the most dedicated student of the monarchy. Though Marr admits to having once been a republican, both authors are now patently supportive of the monarchy, and strong, if not wholly uncritical, admirers of the Queen.

Marr’s book is a biography. ‘This is not a particularly gossipy life story,’ he claims. Childhood, marriage, all the well known features of her private/public life, feature prominently, but

I am more interested in trying to explain what monarchy now means; why the Windsor dynasty behaves as it does; and what having a Queen for all these years, rather than a succession of presidents, might mean.

Hardman is a professional royalty- watcher. His aim is more to explain the machinery of monarchy than to describe the monarch herself: his book is a series of essays — ‘Her Politicians’, ‘Her and Us’, her travels — which together provide a picture of what the Royal Family, the Queen in particular, actually does.