The Uncommon Reader

about books, too, and people. But not gossip. I don’t care for gossip. A roundabout book. I think it was E. M. Forster who said: “Tell all the truth but tell it slant, success in circuit lies.” Or was it ,” she asked the room, “Emily Dickinson?”
    Unsurprisingly, the room did not answer.
    “But one mustn’t talk about it or it will never get written.”
    It was no comfort to the prime minister to reflect that whereas most people when claiming to want to write a book would never get it written, with the Queen and her terrible sense of duty it could be guaranteed that she would.
    “Now, Prime Minister ,” she turned to him gaily, “you were saying?”
    The prime minister rose. “Respectful as we are of your intentions, ma’am” — the prime minister’s tone was casual and friendly — “I think I have to remind you that you are in a unique position.”
    “I seldom forget it ,” said the Queen. “Go on.”
    “The monarch has, I think I’m right in saying, never published a book.”
    The Queen shook her ringer at him, a gesture she remembered in the moment of making it that was a mannerism of Noel Coward’s. “That isn’t quite true, Prime Minister. My ancestor Henry VIII, for instance, wrote a book. Against heresy. That is why one is still called Defender of the Faith. So, too, did my namesake Elizabeth I.”
    The prime minister was about to protest.
    “No, one knows it isn’t the same, but my great-grandmother Queen Victoria, she wrote a book also, Leaves from a Highland Journal , and a pretty tedious book it is, too, and so utterly without offence as to be almost unreadable. It’s not a model one would want to follow. And then of course” — and the Queen looked hard at her first minister — “there was my uncle the Duke of Windsor. He wrote a book, A King’s Story , the history of his marriage and subsequent adventures. If nothing else, that surely counts as a precedent?”
    Furnished with the advice of the attorney general on this very point, the prime minister smiled and almost apologetically made his objection. “Yes, ma’am, I agree, but the difference, surely, is that His Royal Highness wrote the book as Duke of Windsor. He could only write it because he had abdicated.”
    “Oh, did I not say that?” said the Queen. “But…why do you think you’re all here?”