The Queen

Monarchy in Britain is a mindset - sociological and emotional - seldom scrutinised save by diehard supporters or detractors.

Matthew Dennison's new biography of Elizabeth II offers to evaluate a magisterial reign now spanning seven decades and the Queen's record as practitioner of monarchy. The person of the monarch is the closest an ethnically and culturally diverse society comes to a visible representative of past, present and future, although population changes since 1945 have made it impossible for Elizabeth II convincingly to embody the wide-ranging outlooks and aspirations of a muddled demographic. Instead she is understood as the champion of a handful of 'British' values endorsed - if no longer practised - by the bulk of the nation: service, duty, steadfastness, charity, stoicism: a visible definition of an aspect of 'Britishness'.

The Queen is the story of Elizabeth II told in ten parts: Elizabeth of York (the Queen's childhood); A Princess's Fairytale (marriage and early married life); Queen of Hearts (accession and Coronation); Bagehot's Queen (doing the job in the 1950s and 1960s); Vision and Television (tentative modernising in the altered climate of the 1960s, the Royal Family film); Sterling Silver (the Silver Jubilee and consolidation of popular support in the 1970s); Royal Family (marriages of the Queen's children and the family soap opera of the 1980s); Common wealth? (the debates of the 1990s; accessibility and accountability; changes in the wake of the annus horribilis and Diana's death); Golden (rehabilitation of a tarnished crown in the Noughties; triumph of the Golden Jubilee); Gloriana (hagiography in old age; milestones and records).

About the Author

Matthew Dennison is the author of eight critically acclaimed works of non-fiction, including Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West, a Book of the Year in The Times, Spectator, Independent and Observer. His most recent book is the much-praised Eternal Boy, a life of Kenneth Grahame.