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.)