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Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times by Sarah Bradford (view source)
Revision as of 16:49, 15 September 2020
, 16:49, 15 September 2020no edit summary
{{infoboxinfobox1
|title=Queen Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times
|author=Sarah Bradford
|borrow=Yes
|isbn=978-0670919116
|pages=305
|publisher=Viking
|date=December 2011
|website=http://www.sarahbradford.co.uk/
|summary=A medium-length biography-cum-history of Queen Elizabeth II and her reign, published to coincide with the Diamond Jubilee.
|cover=0670919128
|aznuk=0670919128
|aznus=B006B6YTQS
}}
Hopes of a second great Elizabethan age were built up at the time of the coronation, but within a year or so it became evident that ''Britain might have won the [Second World] War but it was about to lose the peace.'' Only a few months after the humiliating Suez affair came criticism of the Queen’s court and personal style from Malcolm Muggeridge, John Grigg and others, and the matter of Princess Margaret’s affair with Peter Townsend, a divorcee whom she would have surely been allowed to marry some two or three decades later but certainly not in 1955 when the moral code was far more rigid.
A major change in general attitudes came during the 1960s and a general lessening of deference to and enthusiasm for the monarchy, and the retirement in 1968 of Commander Colville as Press Secretary, a man who had always been careful to issue as little information to the press as possible. Under the guidance of his guidancesuccessor, William Heseltine, aided by the Duke of Edinburgh and his uncle Earl Mountbatten, came something of a major relaunch, designed to show the monarchy as more outgoing and accessible, beginning with the investiture of the Prince of Wales and the Royal Family film. Bradford shows how hindsight would reveal the latter in particular to be a mixed blessing, inadvertently whetting the public’s interest in ''the royal soap opera''. Of course, nobody could have anticipated the family crises when the marriages of the three elder children disintegrated in the 1990s and the tabloids fed the frenzied appetites of their readers, determined to know everything. From 1991, with criticism of the younger royal family’s lifestyle during the Gulf war and the economic crisis of the time, to the acrimonious breakdown of the Prince and Princess of Wales’s marriage and death of Diana six years later, times were indeed lean for the monarchy. After the new millennium, the death of the ever-popular Queen Mother and the Golden Jubilee, and the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, the pendulum appears to have swung the other way.
The Queen’s relations with her various Prime Ministers are well dealt with, from her rapport with Callaghan and her differences with Heath and Thatcher, to some extent the result of her preference for the Commonwealth vis-a-vis European integration. It is however perhaps too early to pass anything approaching a definitive verdict on such matters. Any book of this kind must to some extent be an interim report; but Bradford has written a very readable, satisfyingly impartial life and times of the monarch as she approaches her Diamond Jubilee. It is regrettably marred by one or two inaccuracies; Elizabeth was the third, not the first, grandchild of George VIV; and John Lennon returned his MBE in the autumn of 1969, not January.
Our thanks to Viking for sending Bookbag a review copy.
If this book appeals then we can recommend [[A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr]] or [[My Husband and I: The Inside Story of 70 Years of the Royal Marriage by Ingrid Seward]].
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[[Category:History]]