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Hello and welcome to Spectator Out Loud. Each week we choose pieces from the magazine and ask their writers to read them aloud.

I'm Oster Redmondson,

and for this week's Coronation Special, we've chosen four articles. Firstly, William Moore

remembers the 1953 coronation with those that were there. Katie Balls reads her politics

column on a tale of two appointments. Dan Hitchens reads his lead in the arts pages of the magazine

on The Art of the Coronation,

and Ascender Maxstone Graham reviews The Seaside by Madeleine Bunting.

Up first, William Moore.

Lady Rosemary Muir was 23 when she received a letter from the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl Marshall,

informing her that she had been chosen as one of the six

maids of honour to assist the mistress of the robes in the coronation of Elizabeth II.

That was in January, 1953. From then, until the coronation day in June, the maids of honour were

the subject of many excited articles. The press dubbed them,

the lucky six, envied by every other woman in the land. Envied, they certainly were, but luck

had little to do with it. Lady Rosemary tells me it was no great surprise to her that she was

appointed to be a maid of honour.

I was a Duke's daughter, she says, as we look through her hefty album of coronation photographs and cuttings.

Why shouldn't I be?

We meet in March, when newspapers are full of jumpy reports that the coronation for Charles III will be stripped back.

The king will not wear breaches or silk stockings. There will be no coronets for the peers,

no specially made coronation stools for the guests. There will be only 2,000 guests in Westminster

...