Called "fascinatingly complex" by The Wall Street Journal, this New York Times bestseller is the first biography of Great Britain's current monarch written by a palace insider--Sarah Bradford, the Viscountess Bangor. This definitive, widely-praised biography includes many never-before-seen photographs. Although it conscientiously chronicles the marital misadventures of the English queen's offspring, this solid, evenhanded book devotes more time to assessing Elizabeth's considerable skills as a constitutional monarch and the political crises confronted and (for the most part) resolved since her coronation in 1953. On the personal side, Sarah Bradford offers a three-dimensional rendering of a kind, rather unimaginative woman, a devoted wife but distant mother with a tendency to ignore family troubles in the shortsighted hope that they would simply go away. A nice example of the traditional British biography.