The funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022 was watched by around 28 million people in the UK alone. In her lifetime, she was one of the most photographed and scrutinised figures in the world. Yet few could say they knew the late monarch since, says biographer Craig Brown, she kept “her interior world screened from public view” and was “a human looking-glass: the light cast by fame bounced off her, and back on to those she faced”.

Little wonder, then, that A Voyage Around the Queen does not follow the usual conventions of a biography. Instead of a chronological account of its subject, it is a patchwork of news reports, letters, diary entries, secondhand anecdotes, tweets and even dreams. The result is a wide-ranging and thoroughly entertaining portrait not just of the woman but the psyche of her subjects. You don’t have to be a royalist to enjoy such titbits as Kingsley Amis anxiously loading up on Imodium prior to meeting the queen lest he fart in her orbit, or the list of wedding gifts given to the royal couple in 1947 which includes bibles, tea cosies, bookends, paperweights, 500 cases of tinned pineapple from the state of Queensland and 148 pairs of nylon stockings “from Americans sensitive to Britain’s postwar shortage”.

Actor Harriet Walter is the narrator, her reading threaded with irreverence but no trace of snark. She expertly gives voice to those who met or shared opinions on the queen, among them Richard Dimbleby, Winston Churchill, Salvador Dalí, Margaret Thatcher, and Paul McCartney who, in Her Majesty, sang that she was “a pretty nice girl, but she doesn’t have a lot to say”.

• Available via 4th Estate, 19hr 46min.

Further listening

The Coming Storm by Gabriel Gatehouse
Penguin Audio, 9hr 35min
Adapted from the podcast of the same name, the journalist and broadcaster’s account of the conspiracy theories blighting American society.

Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton
Canongate, 6hr 29min
Louise Brealey narrates this moving memoir of a life transformed by an encounter with a young hare.