Q: A Voyage Around the Queen

by Craig Brown

Overview

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

The Telegraph (Top 10) • The Washington Post • The Guardian • The Times (London) Independent (London) • Vox • New Statesman

Virginia Woolf compared her to a caterpillar; Anne Frank kept pictures of her on the wall of the Secret Annex; Jimi Hendrix played her tune; Haile Selassie gave her a gold tiara; Dirk Bogarde watched Death in Venice with her; Andy Warhol envied her fame; Donald Trump offended her; E. M. Forster confessed he would have married her, if only she had been a boy.

Queen Elizabeth II was famous for longer than anyone who has ever lived. When people spoke of her, they spoke of themselves; when they dreamed of her, they dreamed of themselves. She mirrored their hopes and anxieties. To the optimist, she seemed an optimist; to the pessimist, a pessimist; to the awestruck, charismatic; and to the cynical, humdrum. Though by nature reserved and unassuming, her presence in a room could make presidents, tycoons, and rock stars turn back into the nervous children they once were. For close to a century, she inhabited the psyche of the world.

Combining biography, essay, cultural history, dream diary, travelog, and satire, Craig Brown—the bestselling and award-winning author of Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret and Hello Goodbye Hello—presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of this most public yet most private of sovereigns in Q: A Voyage Around the Queen.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250397652
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	09/30/2025
Pages:	672
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Craig Brown is a prolific journalist and author. He has been writing his parodic diary in Private Eye since 1989. He is the only person ever to have won three different Press Awards—for best humorist, columnist, and critic—in the same year. He has been a columnist for The Guardian, The Times (London), The Spectator, and The Daily Telegraph, among others. He currently writes for The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday. His New York Times bestseller, Hello Goodbye Hello was translated into ten languages.

Editorial Reviews

Q is a portrait of Queen Elizabeth unlike any other . . . absorbing, edifying and frequently laugh-out-loud funny.” —Clare McHugh, The Washington Post

“An engrossing, comprehensive and gloriously bizarre portrait of the late monarch.” —John Banville, The Guardian

“An entertaining and revealing digest…fascinating… Craig Brown has captured something essential about Britain’s curious relationship with royalty.” —Miranda France, TLS

From the Publisher

2024-07-17
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.

Kirkus Reviews