Brown can be faulted for devoting too many pages to the queen’s corgis — their rowdy behavior, their diet and their ancestry. I also found myself skimming the lengthy sections in which people describe dreams they’ve had involving the queen. But otherwise Q: A Voyage Around the Queen remains absorbing, edifying and frequently laugh-out-loud funny.
Depicts the monumental figure at its center with magnanimous levity ... Plausible evidence for the case that any book about the monarch is also a book about the realm and its populace.
Cleverly constructed, consistently insightful and hilarious, and quite possibly the closest we will ever come to understanding who the Sphinx of Balmoral really was.
It has taken a humorist, Craig Brown...a man who supposedly trades in throwaway wisecracks, to tell us something thought-provoking, perhaps even deep, about monarchy ... Many enjoyable vignettes ... Perhaps she is speaking to us between the lines of what others say about her. This might just be her story, as told to Craig Brown.
Brown does not omit the royal family’s well-publicized scandals, but the tone here overall is appreciative and nostalgic. A gently satiric reflection, even including dreams, of how the world went gaga for Queen Elizabeth.
