You Look Awfully Like the Queen

During the early 1980s, the Guardian first published two camp anecdotes about the Queen Mother. Readers reeled to see stories actually printed in a national newspaper that until then had had only an underground existence in certain circles. After that, tales about the royal family became respectable; they were also, quite rightly, believed. Taken as a whole they reflect the contradictory roles we like royalty to fulfil: unworldly and impossibly regal or engagingly domesticated and just like us, or camp, worldly and outrageous. In this affectionate tribute Thomas Blaikie has gathered together a compendium of stories, many of them never published before, which provide access to an alternative world.