The trivial details about royalty are what really fascinate us

For the moment, can there be anything new to say about Elizabeth II? In time, the archives will open up and more of her correspondence and any of the diary we know she kept will be made available to the public. (I wouldn’t get too excited – no monarch’s diary since Victoria’s has had much to tell us about its writer). But for now you would be forgiven for thinking every scrap has been gone over, every anecdote and every major or minor event in a long life.

In an excruciating encounter with HM, Brown told her the plot of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

The first published biography of Elizabeth II came out in 1930, when she was four years old. When she died in 2022, she had been constantly written about for almost a century. In some ways we know more about her than about anyone who ever lived. The events of her life are minutely chronicled from hour to hour. We know so much about her speech, her voice recorded and preserved from her early teens to shortly before her death at 96, that her vowels could be the subject of a valuable linguistic study in the pronunciation shifts in upper-class English.

She pervaded our lives for so long that we still say ‘the Queen’ when we mean her, and not the present one; we dreamt and dream about her; our encounters with her, near or remote, were always worth preserving. Yet, wading through the immense bibliography, we come very quickly to the limits of what is known, and the interminable repetition of the same episodes. Perhaps, one might think, there could be a moratorium on the subject.

That, however, was before Craig Brown turned his mind to it. A Voyage Around the Queen is an extraordinarily original, enlightening and fresh look at Elizabeth II.