The worst thing first: You have to get through 1,000 pages from cover to cover, but meticulously retelling a century long life takes up space, even when leaving out everything relevant. If you are one of the poor persons living in circles where you are expected to have this book lying around, you might put four legs on it and use it as a cocktail table (don’t forget to serve gin on it).

Anybody expecting even vestiges of journalism from Shawcross, that’s the guy who exposed the secret bombing of Cambodia by the United States, will be shocked by the frivolous emptiness of this book. It is crammed to the rafters with everything one already knows and manages to leave out anything that might even just resemble news. Even old news is glossed over if it would scratch the glossy surface if mentioned

Obviously, as Queen of England (plus some other B-list countries) and Empress of India, she had to be a prime performer on the world stage; unhappily, the book is all about the performance and not about the performer. If you want to believe the book, the Queen Mum was all sugar. You never get to see the ruthless politician with an iron core that was the real her, a personality that makes Margaret Thatcher look like a cuddly toy. Her political views are never mentioned, though they would make Prince Philip look like a model in political correctness.

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The book completely fails to show up how the woman who didn’t want to become a Queen Consort was such a success at it, because sugar and charm were not the ingredients of that success, only its icing. It also doesn’t show her as the driving force behind the complete exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor (the former King Edward VIII), and why she was so right in doing that to two Nazi sympathizers.

Is there anybody who should read this book? Maybe there are people who might glean something from it, apart from the undiscerning fan crowd. I had to battle through pages and pages of description of each and every piece of fashion that was ever made for her. As a historical compilation of fashion over a century, the book might just serve a purpose. But be warned, it is written as badly as any of Dame Barbara Cartland’s novels.

I can’t recommend the book as a good read either; the repetitions were just boring and tedious, and when the author used the words ‘delightful’ and ‘thrilled’ for the thousandth time, I could happily have throttled him. What is exciting about the book is the fact that it shows an Empress of India who never quite came to grips with the fact that she had become an ex-Empress after the war and was not a prime player in world politics anymore, but monarch of a small country on the very edge of Europe; and as the book progresses, the writer loses his perspective more and more and regresses into that warped view himself.

It is, in that sense, a perfect representation of Britain today, a country lost in a dream of grandeur long past; a government labouring under the delusion that Europe needs it; and people hardly able to write and read, thanks to the shambles they call schools, imagining that they have something other to give to the world apart from being a bad example of how things should not be done.

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