Book description
Elizabeth II has lived through the Abdication, the Blitz and World
War Two, the sex and spy scandals of the swinging sixties, the Cold
War and the nuclear threat and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. She has
known 11 US Presidents including JFK and Ronald Reagan, and other
world leaders like President Mandela and Pope John XXII. Her Prime
Ministers have ranged from Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher to
David Cameron, the last only ten years older than her grandson.
Her own family experiences, a mixture of happiness and crisis,
weddings and divorces, and, in the case of Diana, violent death, have
been lived in the glare of tabloid headlines. More than 2 billion
people watched the wedding of her grandson Prince William to Catherine
Middleton in 2010 shortly before she made the first State Visit to
Ireland by a British monarch for 100 years. Our world has changed more
in her lifetime than in any of her predecessors': the Queen has
remained a calm presence at the centre, earning the respect of
monarchists and republicans. How has she done it?
