I enjoyed learning the word “rumbustious,” and that the royals once amused themselves on a beach in a downright Kennedyesque fashion, flinging “small pellets of bird dung” at one another and then catapulting into the sea. No matter what one thinks of the monarchy as it has changed and frayed, been interrogated and even ridiculed, the woman this baby would become, and her long-running leadership, deserves thoughtful analysis: more than a dash through the existing literature and a quick dip into Special Collections.Įven during a rote command performance, Morton can be droll and dry, noting that our heroine’s upbringing was “less Disney, more brothers Grimm” and that her gilded paternal bloodline included a dentist. That doesn’t seem entirely worthy of its sturdy subject, who was born in 1926, and, Morton writes in one of several flights of floridity, quickly put to sleep beneath “an imagined layette of magic and myth, a gossamer blanket where new threads were constantly interwoven into the patchwork of legend and reality.” Like Linus Van Pelt’s, this was “a blanket that would accompany her throughout her life.” But even though the new biography was finished in August, according to publicity materials, it feels rushed and undernourished. I cannot fault his publisher for wanting to capitalize on this confluence of events. “The Queen: Her Life” was originally supposed to be published next spring, but then Her Majesty, in a final act of her famous grace, died in time for the holiday book-buying season - and, as it happens, the fifth season of the Netflix series “ The Crown,” in which Morton, receiving the ultimate tribute to his trade, is played by the actor Andrew Steele. He could have written a stand-alone biography of Elizabeth in his sleep - and now perhaps he has. (A Monica Lewinsky book was in there, too.) He’s been upstairs and downstairs, chatted with courtiers and correspondents and, he hints, befriended some in the innermost circle who’d rather stay anonymous. After “Diana,” he turned to William and Kate to Wallis to Meghan to Diana and Diana and Diana again, like a whirling dervish of dish, and most recently to Elizabeth and Margaret.
He’s on a first-name basis with the lot of them, at least on the page.īefore “Diana,” Morton had written books on Andrew and Sarah.
Ever since his early-1990s blockbuster “ Diana: Her True Story,” about the Princess of Wales (which was expanded after her death), Andrew Morton has been the best known and most accessible, if not the foremost, biographer of England’s royal family.
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