Queen and Country - Hardcover

Shawcross, William

3.81

77 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0771080565 ISBN 13: 9780771080562

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart, 2002

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“In the old days, the monarch led his soldiers on the battlefield and his leadership at all times was close and personal. Today things are very different. I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice. But I can do something else. I can give you my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations."
–from Queen Elizabeth II’s Christmas broadcast, 1957

This beautiful and perceptive book details the Queen’s achievements through decades of upheaval and reveals the personal qualities that have made those achievements possible. With an authoritative text and remarkable photographs – most of them in colour – Queen and Country tells anew the story of Queen Elizabeth II’s 50-year reign. From the romantic and tragic beginning, to the tumultuous and eventful present, the BBC along with reporter, author, and broadcaster William Shawcross show how Elizabeth II’s strength of character, acute intelligence, and ingrained reticence have both shaped and been buffeted by a drastically changing world.

The story that Shawcross tells focuses on the Queen’s constancy through 50 years of extraordinary change. From the middle of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, the Queen has watched the rise and fall of labour unions, the building and partial dismantling of the welfare state, and the progress by turns of socialism, conservatism, Labour, neo-conservatism, and New Labour. She has been counselor and sometimes friend to ten prime ministers of Britain and to dozens of Commonwealth leaders abroad. The small and mainly respectful band of reporters present when Elizabeth became queen have been replaced by an enormous cohort of technicians operating in a variety of media with a relentless and remorseless hunger, not so much for news as for scandal. But, while members of her family have been embarrassed or disgraced, her own rectitude has never been questioned.

Queen Elizabeth’s real achievement is that she has been true to the promise she made to her subjects in her Christmas broadcast in 1957.

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Review:

Watching Queen Elizabeth place flowers at a makeshift memorial to Diana in 1997, journalist (and renowned Nixon-basher) William Shawcross sympathized with the often misunderstood monarch: "I thought how lonely she must feel, and how perplexed she must be by the vast changes through which Britain has passed in the decades since her accession."

The U.K. is now not quite so united, not quite so British, not nearly so powerful as it was in the time of her father, George VI. Elizabeth has struck many observers as a lonely, aloof soul, struggling valiantly to hold a difficult family together while assuring her nation that the constitutional monarchy remains relevant in the modern world.

Over half a century of rule, Shawcross suggests, the queen has risen to every occasion and capably led both the British Commonwealth and the royal family, even if both have given her plenty of troubles in the bargain. This well-written and nicely illustrated portrait does a fine job of showing the many ways she has earned the affections, respect, and consent of her people. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

William Shawcross is an established and widely respected reporter, writer, and broadcaster. His articles have appeared in numerous newspapers and he has written books on subjects ranging from Cambodia to Rupert Murdoch. He lives in England.

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