Queen Elizabeth and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
For some reason I've been reading a lot of Royal biographies recently. I quite like them for a number of reasons. I tend to find biographies rather dull until the subject becomes famous, although I know the childhood bits are meant to be the important ones. With Royalty however, and particularly the current Queen, fame comes very early on. Also I find tales of Court life, in all its ludicrousness, endlessly fascinating. Elizabeth, by Sarah Bradford, was OK, and I see she's repeating a lot of in the Daily Mail in a serialisation of her new book on Diana. Bradford wasn't afraid to be critical at times, whilst retaining the standard creeping tone (I particulary enjoy examples of Royal 'humour', which in anyone else would be called rudeness). That's not something you could say about Hugo Vickers, whose criticism of the Queen Mother in his new biography is hard to detect even where it seems clearly justified. Otherwise it covers the long life reasonably well. The Amazon reviewers are right though - he is overly fascinated with minutiae of Royal hangers-on. The final biography, one of the Queen written in 1992, was terrible. It denied in quite vehement terms that there was any major problem in the Wales' marriage. I can't remember the name, but it might have been this one. Next stop - Ben Pimott's biography.
posted by Matthew @ 9/14/2006 06:55:00 PM
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