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For 96 years, the queen indeed stayed quieter than any of them.
But she was a living ghost.
Morton knew how to glom on.
Finally, there was a 25th-anniversary edition ofHer True Story.
Like its subject, it just wants to sell itself.
Morton struck it lucky with Diana.
And the former Princess of Wales couldnt help but intrigue.
Her disco-ball character bounced light in every direction; she spun around to reveal fragmented sides.
By contrast, the queens life is a black hole, just how she wanted it.
Which doesnt mean it cant be done.
you might practically smell Browns burning shoe leather in the reporting.
Sure, she has a strange predilection for equating equine enthusiasm with sexual vigor.
But then again, she also knows the literal ins and outs of the royals bedroom behavior.
Morton knows the lifes strokes, but doesnt (or doesnt want to) fill in the fine points.
Then again, you already know her life details.
The oldest child of the spare, Elizabeth unexpectedly became heir at age 10 when her uncle abdicated.
Queen at 25, when her father died while she toured Africa.
But what do we do with a biography of a person who refused to present herself as a person?
(Youll find no claims here about the queens sexual prowess.)
Morton cannot, or will not, survey the monarchy with the eye for absurdity that it deserves.
The only thing Elizabeth ever lost was the rest of the empire.
Not that Morton touches the monarchs-as-colonizers with his white biographers gloves.
It was a nation, Morton writes, as the princess concluded, where some live like kings.
Even if she saw the irony in that, Morton doesnt.
It also inadvertently makes her appear much stupider than we know she was.
What is a queen for?
Morton accepts at face value the most ludicrous system of government mankind had fashioned.
But he doesnt pause to consider that the work of the monarch is self-perpetuation.
I, for one, want to know where the institution ended and the woman began.
After all, she seemed sweet but ramrod, what my own grandmother would have called a real spitfire.
