Q A voyage around the queen

Critic and satirist Brown (150 Glimpses of the Beatles) depicts Queen Elizabeth (1926--2022) as "a human looking-glass" in this clever and stylish portrait. Conveying the queen's impact as "otherworldly," Brown suggests that "like the Mona Lisa" her gaze connected with everyone in the room, reflecting back the observers' own inclinations ("To the optimist she seemed an optimist; to the pessimist, a pessimist. To the insider she appeared intimate, to the outsider, distant; to the cynic, prosaic, and the awestruck, charismatic"). In keeping with Brown's previous studies of Princess Margaret and the Beatles, among others, this is less a biography than an archaeology of Elizabeth's public persona. The narrative is comprised of vignettes about and observations made by a host of famous writers (from Virginia Woolf to Hilary Mantel) and other notables that reveal the feelings of intimidation and wrong-footedness that overcame them when they encountered the monarch, as they projected onto her their fears, hopes, and insecurities. This applies even to skeptics; for example, Mantel, a critic of the monarchy, wrote that during a reception for authors, the queen's face "expressed... hurt and bewilderment" at Mantel's predatory gaze, which Brown interprets as a touch of guilty self-psychologizing on Mantel's part. The result is a sweeping, sharp-eyed cultural history of the monarchy as presided over by its most iconic modern royal. (Sept.)

Fond mosaic of the far-reaching life of the late Queen Elizabeth. A keen observer of the royals, British humorist and prolific author Brown offers a roaming, disjointed collage of Elizabeth II, who died at age 96 in 2022. A symbol, a cypher, and an icon, the queen was the country's obsession as well as a mirror to its people over her long life. "There are even times I wonder if I know more about the Queen and her family than I do about myself," Brown writes. Her entire life from birth in 1926 was open to public scrutiny; the first biography about her was published when she was four. "Hers was the most familiar, most photographed face in human history," he adds. The author devotes many of his short, breezy chapters to encounters with the queen recorded by Kingsley Amis, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Philip Larkin, Cecil Beaton, and Hillary Mantel, among others: what it felt like to be in the presence of this formidable face, shake her hand, and get caught in terrifying, platitudinous exchanges with her. In her presence, people were often tongue-tied or star-struck or got woozy, records Brown, even those as famous as she. Her natural reticence made much conversation awkward, outside of discussing her beloved horses and corgis, but she was dogged in the meet-and-greet until her dying days. Complimented on her acting in a movie cameo with Paddington Bear in the last year of her life, she replied, "Well of course, I do it all the time." Brown does not omit the royal family's well-publicized scandals, but the tone here overall is appreciative and nostalgic. A gently satiric reflection, even including dreams, of how the world went gaga for Queen Elizabeth. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.