For fans of The Crown — which surgically removed the Queen Mother’s sense of humour, and Craig Brown’s bestseller Ma’am Darling which hilariously captured Princess Margaret and the rest of the royal roost — this biography is part-joke book, part-skimming stone biography, and part-travel guide to a world that doesn’t exist anymore. In a journey of 101 vignettes, Gareth Russell captures the incredibly dry, incredibly popular personality of the Queen Mother, whose public life neatly spanned the entire twentieth century. This traces a journey from the Queen Mother’s happy Edwardian childhood through her teenage years watching the First World War, the interwar party truncated by the hangover of her brother-in-law’s abdication, to her zenith as queen in the 1940s when Adolf Hitler called her ‘the most dangerous woman in Europe’. Then, her half-century long widowhood, during which she consistently remained one of the most popular members of the Royal Family in any poll conducted between 1953 and 2002.