Counting One's Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother

by William Shawcross (Editor)

Overview

William Shawcross's official biography of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, published in September 2009, was a huge critical and commercial success.One of the great revelations of the book was Queen Elizabeth's insightful, witty private correspondence. Indeed, The Sunday Times described her letters as "wonderful . . . brimful of liveliness and irreverence, steeliness and sweetness."

Now, in Counting One's Blessings, Shawcross has put together a selection of her letters, drawing on the vast wealth of material in the Royal Archives and at Glamis Castle. Queen Elizabeth was a prolific correspondent, from her early childhood before World War I to the very end of her long life at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and her letters offer readers a vivid insight into the real person behind the public face.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466827745
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	11/27/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	689
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

William Shawcross became a writer after leaving University College Oxford in 1968. He was in Czechoslovakia during the Soviet occupation; this inspired his first book, a biography of Alexander Dubcek, the Czechoslovak leader, which was published in 1970. Since then he has written and travelled widely. In 1995 he wrote the BBC Television series Monarchy. In 2002 his BBC Television series and book, Queen and Country, celebrated the Queen's Golden Jubilee and examined the changing face of Britain during her reign. He is also the author of Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11 and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (2012). He lives in England.

Editorial Reviews

One of the unexpected treats of William Shawcross' well-received 2009 official biography of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother (1900-2002) was his excerpting of the long-lived royal's lively correspondence. Those quotations, however, turn out to be only a sampling of her prolific, lifelong output. Counting One's Blessings shares a generous selection of the queen mother's letters, which reaffirm The Sunday Times' previous judgment of them as "wonderful...brimful of liveliness and irreverence, steeliness and sweetness." The collection includes private letters from her childhood to her husband George VI's reign and beyond. A joy of the season for royal watchers.