The Queen’s dedication to service was learnt at her father’s knee

If you have ever thought that there cannot be anything new to say or to learn about the Queen, you have not yet read Robert Hardman’s revelatory new biography of her in this, her astonishing Platinum Jubilee year.

Hardman has spent the past 30 years researching and understanding the British monarchy, and he writes with an extraordinary fount of knowledge but, even more important, with a heartfelt appreciation of what has been called ‘the genius of constitutional monarchy’ and for the members of the family who implement it. He has interviewed everyone possible, including Prince Philip’s German great-niece and almost everyone else on the German side of the family, of whom the Prince took great care – as he did with every aspect of his life.

Queen of Our Times is intimately well- informed but never prurient. It is a stylish riposte to The Crown, the meretricious Netflix series which abuses history and rejoices in trivia and untruths about the royal family. The series has been especially cruel and dishonest about Prince Philip and the Prince of Wales. Time and again, Hardman elegantly exposes its lies.

The Queen’s reign has been defined by the heartfelt pledge she made in South Africa on her 21st birthday – that ‘my whole life whether it be long or short shall be devoted to your service’. Hardman writes that this promise was not in fact delivered on her birthday itself but was recorded by the BBC a week earlier, at a hotel in what was then southern Rhodesia. But, as he says, the important thing was her moving commitment to all the peoples of ‘this ancient Commonwealth, which we all love so dearly’. That trip with her parents through southern Africa in early 1947 forged a lifelong enthusiasm for the emerging Commonwealth of former British colonies.