Has the Queen's diamond jubilee increased the number of books indulging fantasies about being royal or about meeting the Queen? As the parent of young children I am amazed by just how many "royal" books there are. We have never looked for books like this but, judging from displays in bookshops, it seems as if we are expected to want them. Should we?
Robert, father of a seven and four year old.

The brief answer is yes, there are a great many more and whether you want them will depend on how deeply you want your children to engage with the celebrations! But not too much should be read into the proliferation of these titles. After all, it is common enough for the anniversaries of events of national significance to be heavily celebrated in books for children. There must have been a double handful of titles about Titantic in the last few months and the anniversaries of both Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin also created a mini publishing storm.

Moving these events from dry news items and presenting them in ways children can easily understand makes good sense so it is no wonder that there are so many diamond jubilee books piled high in bookshops. Sometimes confusingly, there are also many books highlighting London and the 2012 Olympics. The conflation of these two 2012 events has led some of the best-loved children's book characters, including Peppa Pig, Horrid Henry, Charlie and Lola and Topsy and Tim, to have their names paired with either the Queen or London thus embracing both the Jubilee and the Olympics.

Books like these may not have a long life but, for the short period that they are available, they provide a very useful way of conveying something of the optimism of the moment as well as picking out snippets of information about either of the events in a way that is accessible for the right age reader.

What is perhaps more surprising than any of the above is the tradition of books featuring the Queen as a character in a story – especially as she usually appears as much younger than her real self. (Octogenarians are not much celebrated in children's books.) For the diamond jubilee, in Me, the Queen and Christopher, Giles Andreae tells how a seven-year-old has tea at Buckingham palace and discovers that the Queen is just like her – sort of – and is kind and caring as well. But meeting the Queen in fiction is not just a creation of the diamond jubilee. Roald Dahl's delightful BFG helps the charming Sophie to have tea with the Queen in The BFG while in Morris Gleitzman's classic Two Weeks with the Queen, his hero Luke is certain that the only way of getting help to cure his brother's cancer is to get the Queen involved. It's fanciful and incredible but then, so is much that children read.

And, even at the time of the diamond jubilee, the Queen is not a subject beyond humour; a welcome gold-embossed reissue of Nicholas Allan's picture book The Queen's Knickers takes a cheerily irreverent look at royals.

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