‘I, whose youth was passed in the august, unchallenged and tranquil glories of the Victorian era, may well feel a thrill in invoking once more the prayer and the anthem, “God save the Queen!”’ So ended Winston Churchill’s broadcast across the airwaves on 7 February 1952, the day after Elizabeth II’s accession as monarch on the death of her father, George VI. The aged prime minister was speaking eloquently and emotionally of the then novelty of having a reigning queen after over half a century of kings. 

Seventy years later, in September 2022, the National Anthem changed again, but Liz Truss, two days into her short stint as prime minister, did not come close to matching the rhetoric of Churchill and her words will not be remembered as his are (from lion to lettuce). Yet despite Truss’s inadequacy, and the fact that, unlike in 1952, Britain in the 21st century was no longer at the head of a huge empire with the right and might to sit at the top table, there were few across the globe in 2022 who would think of anyone other than Elizabeth II when hearing the phrase ‘the queen’. That a woman of little more than five foot, who shunned emotional displays and never gave interviews, embraced celebrity or sought to rule, was able to capture the attention of all manner of people across ages and continents and remain respected during seven decades of tumult is astonishing.

In this new book, David Cannadine sets out to explain how this was possible. As befits his role as editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB), Cannadine has produced a brief yet impressively rich and vivid biography. He has skilfully circumvented the limitations of royal biography by weaving