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Hello and welcome to the Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator, and my guest this week is the great Craig Brown, whose new book

is A Voyage Around the Queen. Craig, this is like a demented project of a book.

I mean, writing another book about the Queen. It's something that absolutely shouldn't work and

absolutely does. But before you embarked on it, what was it that made you think what the world

really needs is another book about the late Her Majesty?

It was really after I'd finished the Beatles book. I was thinking, I think my technique,

my slightly sort of mosaic technique only works for someone who's universally known,

that everyone has some impression of and lots of people have met and all that sort of thing and there aren't very many and i didn't really want to do another royal book because i'd already

done princess margaret and i didn't want to become a kind of royal expert in that way but in the end i

thought well the queen is the one because you know she'd well she died when she was 96, but I suppose when I embarked

on it, she was sort of 95 or something like that. And, I mean, Brian Masters reckoned that a third of

British people had dreamed about her. So she had really left an imprint on everyone's psyche.

There was no avoiding her. No one didn't know who she was, you know, almost in the

world. And so that way, I was drawn by her fame and by her effect on everyone else. So in that

way, it's not really a biography of her. It's more about the impression that she made on everyone

else. So you do get all the biographical stuff too. So you embarked on it while she was still with us.

Yes. How did her death kind of change the project?

In a kind of grim literary way, it made it better because I had the beginning and the middle

and the death gave me the end. And actually, I think it would have been, I mean, I could

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