Graham Viney

Graham Viney is the author of The Last Hurrah: The 1947 Royal Tour of Southern Africa and the End of Empire.

70 years on: the making of Queen Elizabeth II

Princess Elizabeth was 25 when her father died. She was on the first leg of a Commonwealth tour and she spent the night of 5 February 1952 at Treetops Hotel, set in the branches of a large fig tree in Aberdare National Park in Kenya. ‘For the first time in the history of the world,’