Author(s): Gareth Russell

Biography & Memoir

This is a biography of the Queen Mother with all the dull bits stripped out. When told that Lady Mountbatten was being buried at sea, the Queen Mother replied cheerfully. ‘Dear old Edwina, she always did like to make a splash!’ For fans of The Crown – which surgically removed the Queen Mother’s sense of humour, and Craig Brown’s bestseller Ma’am Darling which hilariously captured Princess Margaret and the rest of the royal roost – this biography is part-joke book, part-skimming stone biography, and part-travel guide to a world that doesn’t exist anymore. In a journey of 101 vignettes – one for every year of her life – Gareth Russell captures the incredibly dry, incredibly popular personality of the Queen Mother, whose public life neatly spanned the entire twentieth century. This traces a journey from the Queen Mother’s happy Edwardian childhood roaming about a castle that used to belong to the real Macbeth through her teenage years watching the First World War, the interwar party truncated by the hangover of her brother-in-law’s abdication, to her zenith as queen in the 1940s when Adolf Hitler called her ‘the most dangerous woman in Europe’. Then, her half-century long widowhood, during which she consistently remained one of the most popular members of the Royal Family in any poll conducted between 1953 and 2002.