By Bagehot
TO his slight surprise Bagehot was recently asked to review all the new biographies of Queen Elizabeth II being published to mark 2012, her 60th year on the throne. It was a bit like asking an agnostic to be Vatican correspondent, but five books, 1500 pages and a lot of corgi anecdotes later, I finally surfaced. At moments it felt a bit like eating a banquet entirely consisting of cakes and pudding, with Turkish delight to finish. But in amongst the cloying fluff there were some good stories. It was striking to be reminded how shabby and poor war-broken Britain was (there were nice details about peers of the realm at the queen’s coronation in 1953, assured that they could substitute rabbit fur for ermine and told they could hide sandwiches in their coronets).