One night time, the queen of England got here to Johnny Money in a dream. “Johnny Money! You’re like a thorn tree in a whirlwind,” she remarked. When he awoke, the phrase caught with him, and over the subsequent seven years, he turned it into his apocalyptic tune, “The Man Comes Round.”
Q: A Voyage Across the Queen, Craig Brown, Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 672 pp., $35, October 2024
Regardless of his fame, Money and Queen Elizabeth II had by no means met. However she occupied a robust place in his oneiric panorama, simply as she did for numerous others worldwide. Craig Brown’s e book, Q: A Voyage Across the Queen, particulars many individuals’s desires of her, starting from the banal to the erotic.
It’s one of many ways in which Brown approaches a legendarily tough topic to jot down about. Prior to now decade or so, Brown, one in all Britain’s most interesting satirists, has taken his eye for the absurd and began making use of it to biography. That features a e book on the chaotic lifetime of the queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, which mixes might-have-beens, dissection of rumors, parody, and anecdote.
Margaret offered a wealth of fabric. However whereas most of her sister’s life had been lived in public, Elizabeth herself was professionally boring. She inhabited the position of a constitutional monarch to the fullest and gave nothing of her personal self away. In her private life, she married the good-looking younger man that she set her coronary heart on as a young person, and she or he stayed with him till they each died of their late 90s. When she spoke in public, she spoke not as herself, however as her authorities.
Because the e book’s subtitle hints, it isn’t a lot about Elizabeth herself as it’s about individuals’s reactions to her. She is the unmoving focus on which a crowd of worldwide eccentrics and fantasists flip. It’s a piece of fascinating digressions, from an ailing Margaret Thatcher to the Intercourse Pistols to Elena Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator’s spouse. The queen drifts by different individuals’s lives, sometimes saying, “How very attention-grabbing,” or “Have you ever come far?”
Just a few moments of Elizabeth’s humanity break by, corresponding to her mild mothering of a boy who had simply misplaced his twin brother and grandparents on account of a bombing by the Irish Republican Military. Brown means that her love of corgis was as a result of the messy, unrestrained little canines might behave in methods she couldn’t. When she needed to knight an apparent unhealthy egg corresponding to Romanian President Nicolae Ceausescu, who was honored by the British authorities in 1978 as a part of a state go to, she would solely go as far as to flippantly complain about his boorishness. She confided to a buddy that U.S. President Donald Trump was “very impolite” and couldn’t cease staring over her shoulder. (Trump proclaimed that folks had “by no means seen the queen have a greater time” than when he interacted along with her.)
Elizabeth walks along with her corgi on the seashore in Norfolk, United Kingdom, on July 28, 1982.Tim Graham Picture Library through Getty Photographs
As in his earlier books, Brown is within the inherent unreliability of biography; he lists out, as an example, the sheer vary of claims made about Michael Fagan, the unemployed man who efficiently snuck into Elizabeth’s bed room in 1982 and started speaking to her. Their temporary dialog has a half-dozen wildly totally different tellings.
Elizabeth prompted, even within the wealthy and well-known, habits starting from the tongue-tied to the insane. When the Japanese multimillionaire Ryoichi Sasakawa, an ultranationalist and suspected conflict felony, maneuvered his method right into a backyard social gathering to see her as a part of his lobbying for a Nobel Peace Prize, he flung himself at her toes whereas wailing. “He can rise up, you realize,” she remarked.
Sasakawa was purchased to that social gathering as a visitor of an equally crooked determine: Robert Maxwell, a Czech British businessman. Maxwell’s daughter Ghislaine is now, impressively, extra notorious than him. She would later play a important position within the relationship between her boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein and Elizabeth’s second-oldest son, Prince Andrew.
A mural of Prince Andrew, Duke of York, is seen in Shoreditch in London on July 1, 2020, after the prince got here below elevated scrutiny over his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein and British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. Man Smallman/Getty Photographs
Andrew, now faraway from royal roles in shame, was the other of his mom—an energetically indiscreet playboy susceptible to voicing pub-bore opinions. That makes him simpler to jot down about. Extra conventional books on the British royal household fall into two classes: sycophantic or muckraking. Literary agent and historian Andrew Lownie’s Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the Home of York is squarely within the second group, much less of a biography and extra of a blunderbuss shot at Andrew with each scurrilous story and piece of palace gossip that Lownie can discover.
Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the Home of York, Andrew Lownie, Westminster Press, 362 pp., $24.99, August 2025
That features new claims concerning the extent of Andrew’s relationship with Epstein and Maxwell, who Lownie says was additionally an “occasional lover” of his. That relationship value Andrew most of his royal roles after a disastrous interview during which he unconvincingly denied having ever met Virginia Giuffre—one in all Epstein’s victims who stated the prince slept along with her 3 times when she was simply 17—regardless of her testimony and picture proof. His repute in the UK is trash: That is the sort of e book written by an creator with full confidence that his topic won’t ever deliver a libel go well with.
It’s exhausting to really feel any sympathy for the duke of York, however Lownie’s e book inadvertently turns into an instance of simply how simply tales, even unsourced ones, can stick with the royals. Elizabeth’s untouchability means tall tales connect themselves much more simply to different members of the royal household.
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The e book suffers from an incapacity to tell apart between the well-attested, corresponding to Andrew’s ties to Epstein, and the tales that Lownie was instructed as soon as by any individual who knew Andrew many years in the past or by nameless former staffers. Did he actually have intercourse with a number of ladies earlier than he turned 13? Does he have a secret penchant for good-looking younger sailors? Is it true that he favors “four-handed massages the place two ladies work on you on the similar time,” as one supposed former girlfriend—referred to solely by her first title—claims? Does he name maids as much as the fourth ground of his home simply to open the curtains for him?
Any of those may be true, however I’ve severe doubts that every one of them are. Palace employees and royal hangers-on are a remarkably gossipy bunch with a cheerful disregard for strict accuracy. Again within the early Nineteen Nineties, I heard a narrative from Prince Philip’s safety element about the true cause for then-Prince Charles’s desire for Camilla over Diana that I can not relay to the harmless ears of Overseas Coverage’s readership. I don’t assume the account was true, but it surely was each obscene and really humorous, which is what made it such an interesting story.
Andrew, and Sarah, Duchess of York, throughout an official go to to Liverpool, England, on Feb. 11, 1988. The royal couple had introduced that they had been anticipating their first little one earlier that day. Tim Graham Picture Library through Getty Photographs
The place Lownie is nice is on cash—each incoming and outgoing. He exhibits how Andrew and his former spouse Sarah Ferguson, higher often known as Fergie, felt that their mixed earnings in 1986, after they married, was far lower than they wanted. Andrew’s naval wage and Fergie’s publishing wage totaled 32,000 British kilos, which is roughly $160,000 at this time; this was supplemented by round $250,000 in at this time’s cash that the British authorities paid them yearly by the Civil Checklist to cowl official bills. Additionally they acquired a number of properties and inherited appreciable household cash.
This was not, nonetheless, sufficient for his or her wants. Fergie comes throughout higher than her husband in Lownie’s account, not solely as a steadily type and beneficiant buddy but in addition as a form of Kim Kardashian avant la lettre, forging a multimillion-pound earnings from offers that ranged from youngsters’s books to Weight Watchers endorsements. However each of them spent at an exhausting fee, leaving many questions on simply the place their cash got here from—particularly after Fergie was caught on tape in 2010 promising to promote entry to her former husband to a tabloid reporter, who was in disguise as a Center Japanese sheikh, in trade for greater than half one million {dollars}.
In line with Lownie, the couple first met American financier and intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein in 1989, roughly a decade earlier than Andrew now claims. The fabric round Epstein’s ties to Andrew is attention-grabbing and usually new, and it has prompted a firestorm within the British press, but it surely’s additionally chaotically organized and contextless. Lownie demonstrates that Andrew was not an off-the-cuff buddy, however a long-term intimate of Epstein—and one whose worth the financier knew, calling him his “Tremendous Bowl trophy.” A extra considerate e book might need thought-about the broader social world during which Epstein operated for canopy—one the place, as sociologist Ashley Mears documented in her e book Very Vital Folks, the supply of younger ladies who’re seen as sexually obtainable is a vital type of social connection between the wealthy and highly effective.
From left: Melania Trump, Andrew, Gwendolyn Beck, and Epstein at a celebration on the Mar-a-Lago membership in Palm Seashore, Florida, on Feb. 12, 2000. Davidoff Studios/Getty Photographs
Andrew was near many individuals in that world, from Center Japanese playboys, to Central Asian autocrats, to U.S. billionaires, to alleged Chinese language spies. A lot of his life-style, earlier than the Epstein scandal, got here with the implicit blessing of the British authorities, which used him as a “particular consultant” on commerce to curry favor with overseas despots.
The corporate that Andrew retains appears notably horrible, but it surely’s outstanding simply what number of con artists and little one abusers have latched themselves onto varied royals. Brown brings up Rolf Harris, the once-beloved Australian artist and singer who painted Elizabeth in 2005 for her eightieth birthday—solely to be convicted for serial intercourse offenses towards youngsters a number of years later. Jimmy Savile, a star posthumously revealed to be one in all Britain’s most prolific sexual predators, was an unofficial advisor to Charles and compiled a public relations handbook for the royal household after some tactless remarks by Andrew. Laurens van der Put up, a South African author who was Charles’s long-term buddy and religious guru, was additionally posthumously revealed to be a serial liar who sexually abused a 14-year-old woman.
A younger Andrew waves from a window (at left), with Elizabeth and three different youngsters proven in one other window, of the royal prepare, circa December 1965. Fox Images/Hulton Archive/Getty Photographs
Elizabeth saved herself behind sufficient layers of reserve to largely keep away from this breed of creep and hanger-on. Her youngsters, needier and fewer canny, didn’t. However Andrew went a step past, not solely offering royal patronage to males like Epstein however taking part on the earth of intercourse, coercion, and exploitation. As extra Epstein materials emerges, the complete extent of Andrew’s involvement might turn out to be, as with different distinguished figures near one of many world’s most linked pedophiles, even clearer.
Considered one of Andrew’s (unnamed) former family members claims that the prince’s favourite e book, which he reportedly reads time and again, is The Gifted Mr. Ripley. Patricia Highsmith’s thriller a couple of sexually ambivalent sociopath who charms, after which destroys, a wealthy loafer is a traditional. For Andrew, it might be one thing of a cautionary story.
