One night, the queen of England came to Johnny Cash in a dream. \u201cJohnny Cash! You\u2019re like a thorn tree in a whirlwind,\u201d she remarked<\/a>. When he awoke, the phrase stuck with him, and over the next seven years, he turned it into his apocalyptic song<\/a>, \u201cThe Man Comes Around.\u201d<\/p>\n Q: A Voyage Around the Queen<\/em><\/strong><\/a>, Craig Brown, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 672 pp., $35, October 2024<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Despite his fame, Cash and Queen Elizabeth II had never met<\/a>. But she occupied a powerful place in his oneiric landscape, just as she did for countless others worldwide. Craig Brown\u2019s book, Q: A Voyage Around the Queen<\/em><\/a>, details many people\u2019s dreams of her, ranging from the banal to the erotic.<\/p>\n It\u2019s one of the ways that Brown approaches a legendarily difficult subject to write about. In the past decade or so, Brown, one of Britain\u2019s finest satirists, has taken his eye for the absurd and started applying it to biography. That includes a book<\/a> on the chaotic life of the queen\u2019s sister, Princess Margaret, which mixes might-have-beens, dissection of rumors, parody, and anecdote.<\/p>\n Margaret provided a wealth of material. But while most of her sister\u2019s life had been lived in public, Elizabeth herself was professionally boring. She inhabited the role of a constitutional monarch to the fullest and gave nothing of her own self away. In her personal life, she married the handsome young man that she set her heart on as a teenager, and she stayed with him until they both died in their late 90s. When she spoke in public, she spoke not as herself, but as her government.<\/p>\n As the book\u2019s subtitle hints, it isn\u2019t so much about Elizabeth herself as it is about people\u2019s reactions to her. She is the unmoving center around which a crowd of international eccentrics and fantasists turn. It\u2019s a work of fascinating digressions, from an ailing Margaret Thatcher to the Sex Pistols to Elena Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator\u2019s wife. The queen drifts through other people\u2019s lives, occasionally saying, \u201cHow very interesting,\u201d or \u201cHave you come far?\u201d<\/p>\n A few moments of Elizabeth\u2019s humanity break through, such as her gentle mothering of a boy who had just lost<\/a> his twin brother and grandparents as a result of a bombing by the Irish Republican Army. Brown suggests that her love of corgis was because the messy, unrestrained little dogs could behave in ways she couldn\u2019t. When she had to knight an obvious bad egg<\/a> such as Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, who was honored by the British government in 1978 as part of a state visit, she would only go so far as to lightly complain about his boorishness. She confided to a friend that U.S. President Donald Trump was \u201cvery rude\u201d and couldn\u2019t stop staring over her shoulder. (Trump proclaimed<\/a> that people had \u201cnever seen the queen have a better time\u201d than when he interacted with her.)<\/p>\n Elizabeth walks with her corgi on the beach in Norfolk, United Kingdom, on July 28, 1982.Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n As in his previous books, Brown is interested in the inherent unreliability of biography; he lists out, for instance, the sheer range of claims made about Michael Fagan<\/a>, the unemployed man who successfully snuck into Elizabeth\u2019s bedroom in 1982 and began talking to her. Their brief conversation has a half-dozen wildly different tellings.<\/p>\n Elizabeth prompted, even in the rich and famous, behavior ranging from the tongue-tied to the insane. When the Japanese multimillionaire Ryoichi Sasakawa, an ultranationalist and suspected war criminal, maneuvered his way into a garden party<\/a> to see her as part of his lobbying for a Nobel Peace Prize, he flung himself at her feet while wailing. \u201cHe can<\/em> get up, you know,\u201d she remarked.<\/p>\n Sasakawa was brought to that party as a guest of an equally crooked figure: Robert Maxwell, a Czech British businessman. Maxwell\u2019s daughter Ghislaine is now, impressively, more infamous than him. She would later play a critical role in the relationship between her boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein and Elizabeth\u2019s second-oldest son, Prince Andrew.<\/p>\n A mural of Prince Andrew, Duke of York, is seen in Shoreditch in London on July 1, 2020, after the prince came under increased scrutiny over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. Guy Smallman\/Getty Images<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n Andrew, now removed from royal roles in disgrace, was the opposite of his mother\u2014an energetically indiscreet playboy prone to voicing pub-bore opinions. That makes him easier to write about. More traditional books on the British royal family fall into two categories: sycophantic<\/a> or muckraking<\/a>. Literary agent and historian Andrew Lownie\u2019s Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York<\/em><\/a> is squarely in the second group, less of a biography and more of a blunderbuss shot at Andrew with every scurrilous story and piece of palace gossip that Lownie can find.<\/p>\n Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, Andrew Lownie, Westminster Press, 362 pp., $24.99, August 2025<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That includes new claims about the extent of Andrew\u2019s relationship with Epstein and Maxwell, who Lownie says was also an \u201coccasional lover\u201d of his. That relationship cost Andrew most of his royal roles<\/a> after a disastrous interview in which he unconvincingly denied having ever met Virginia Giuffre\u2014one of Epstein\u2019s victims who said the prince slept with her three times when she was just 17\u2014despite her testimony and photo evidence<\/a>. His reputation in the United Kingdom is trash: This is the kind of book written by an author with full confidence that his subject will never bring a libel suit.<\/p>\n It\u2019s hard to feel any sympathy for the duke of York, but Lownie\u2019s book inadvertently becomes an example of just how easily stories, even unsourced ones, can stick to the royals. Elizabeth\u2019s untouchability means tall tales attach themselves even more easily to other members of the royal family.<\/p>\n
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\n <\/span>\n This article is featured in the FP Weekend newsletter, a curation of our best book reviews, deep dives, and other reads that take a step back from the drumbeat of the news. Get the lineup directly every Saturday. <\/h2>\n<\/p>\n