In the eyes of her family, courtiers and the public the young Prince Philip of Greece was a far from ideal suitor. Rough, uneducated and unlikely to be faithful, thought the court. The Queen’s Wedding, Channel 4 2007
The princess was smitten by the good looking, much older cadet. ibid.
He [Dickie] wanted to put himself and the Mountbattens centre stage. ibid.
His background was far from ideal ... In royal terms Philip was a boy from the wrong side of the tracks. ibid.
Philip’s unfortunate links with Nazi Germany: Philip’s family had Germanic origins. ibid.
The new government had inherited a dirty little war in Greece. ibid.
Having played the field during the war, Philip was now set on Elizabeth. ibid.
Next big hurdle: the public’s dissatisfaction over cost. ibid.
In June 1953 in a ritual dating back nine hundred years the Queen was crowned ... Royal weddings came and went. Marriages were dissolved. Royal homes inflamed. Royal children tragically lose their mother. And a new woman arrives. H M Queen: A Remarkable Life, 2002
Trained by Queen Mary, the young princess Elizabeth was very much like her grandmother. ibid.
The current pack of corgis is the tenth generation descended from Susan. ibid.
Horseracing has always given the Queen enormous pleasure. ibid.
The young Princess Diana was thrown into the public spotlight totally unprepared for the demanding nature of the job. ibid.
The Queen did not fully appreciate the gulf between her and her daughters in law. ibid.
Every family has secrets ... Two of the Queen’s cousins have been absent from the feast declared dead to family and society. For decades the cousins remained hidden in an institution for so-called mental defectives. Many thousands of others condemned as idiots and imbeciles shared their fate and were hidden out of sight and out of mind. But the Royal secret was exposed. The Queen’s Hidden Cousins, Channel 4 2011
Katherine Bowes-Lyon, niece to the Queen Mother and cousin to the Queen, is still alive today. ibid.
Katherine and Nerissa were born with learning difficulties and they disappeared from view. ibid.
The advice given to parents was to put their deficient children away and to forget about them. ibid.
In 1941, at the ages of fifteen and twenty-two, Katherine and Nerissa were consigned to the care of the Royal Earlswood institution. ibid.
They found a further three members [Fane sisters] of the [Bowes-Lyon] family had been admitted to the Royal Earlswood on the same day in 1941. ibid.
After the press exposé, a headstone for Nerissa was provided by the family. ibid.
At the height of the Second World War in August 1942 a very special passenger boarded a flying boat in northern Scotland. He was a high ranking member of the Royal Family whose outrageous private life had been a source of damaging rumour and scandal ... Minutes into the flight the aircraft crashed into a mountainside ... Prince George, black sheep of the House of Windsor. The Queen’s Lost Uncle, Channel 4 2003
A world of hard drugs and casual sex with both women and men. ibid.
The fifth son, Prince John, was born with learning disabilities. He was shunned by most of his family. But not by George. ibid.
The king’s artistic young son [George] was an instant hit in London high society. ibid.
Egged on by Edward, George was able to indulge his passion for music, theatre and dancing. ibid.
Noel Coward ... It was to be the start of a passionate affair. ibid.
He began to leave a trail of compromising evidence in his wake. ibid.
He’d got himself a serious morphine addiction. ibid.
Edward dragged George back from his slide into oblivion. ibid.
Princess Marina ... Troublesome young George was finally hitched. ibid.
They had more relatives in Germany than they did in Britain. ibid.
George’s sea-plane departed from the flight plan. ibid.
George’s body was later pulled from the wreckage. He was 39 years old. ibid.
One of the oldest and grandest monarchies of all. Andrew Marr, Diamond Queen I BBC 2012
As a young girl she didn’t expect to become Queen. ibid.
Her father was George V’s second son, Albert of York. ibid.
1936 would become the year of the three kings. ibid.
Oddly, perhaps, she seems to have established a very warm relationship with her first northern Labour prime minister Harold Wilson. ibid.
It’s her government but she is not the government. ibid.
A lot of the Queen’s life has been about travelling abroad. ibid.
She is also Queen of 1.6 million British Muslims. ibid.
The Queen has modernised quite a lot, but it’s worth remembering what she hasn’t. Andrew Marr, Diamond Queen II BBC 2012
The Windsors have always been acutely aware of public opinion and changing attitudes. ibid.
In 1949 as a young married woman the Queen made a speech to the Mothers’ Union denouncing divorce and separation as producing some of the darkest evils in society. ibid.
It’s May 2011 and the Queen is about to set foot in the Irish Republic. ibid.
In 1920 during the Irish War of Independence thirteen spectators and a player were killed here as forces under British control opened fire at a match. ibid.
Sixty years of never standing still. ibid.
The Queen was crowned at Westminster Abbey. Andrew Marr, Diamond Queen III, BBC 2012
A novel aspect of the coronation was that it was televised ... Twenty million people managed to watch. ibid.
Being called by God was not a metaphor; it was absolutely serious. ibid.
The Queen was having to deal with the new medium of television. ibid.
In the event the Silver Jubilee was a great success. ibid.
From 1980 onwards a more aggressive media had a fresh target to hunt: Diana. ibid.
The Queen was soon becoming uneasy about the pressure journalists were piling on her daughter-in-law. ibid.
Both Princess Diana and Prince Charles turned to journalists to tell their side of the story. ibid.
But it was the absence of words which created the biggest media storm of the Queen’s reign when in 1997 on the sudden death of Princess Diana in a Paris car crash the Queen stayed at Balmoral for another four days. ibid.
Princess Elizabeth, just 25 years old, was now Queen Elizabeth II. Churchill was ne his way to address the Commons. Despite his grief, he saw in the young and glamorous queen the promise of a new Elizabethan age to rival even the golden age of Elizabeth I. New Elizabethans With Andrew Marr I: Building a New Society, BBC 2020
The Queen has presided over a period of unrivalled peace and prosperity. But also over a period of astonishing change. ibid.
The nation that learned of the conquest of Everest that auspicious day feels today like another country: class-obsessed, overwhelmingly white and Christian, deeply conservative about the role of women, much more easily embarrassed about sex. ibid.
James became Jan Morris [1926-2020]: Jan Morris stands as a powerful symbol of the shifting thinking about identity was to come over the Queen’s reign. ibid.
The Ruth Ellis case was a genuine watershed in British justice: hanging had been very popular in this country but what was done on that July morning to a young, traumatized, and abused woman horrified and disgusted millions of the Queen’s subjects. ibid.
The Case of the Mangrove 9: August 1970 a street demonstration against the repeated raids on the Mangrove [restaurant]. It wasn’t a very big one, about 150 people left this restaurant to march around local police stations which were heavily defended by hundreds of police. Violence flared and demonstrators were grabbed and thrown into the back of police vans. In the end, nine demonstrators including Frank Critchlow, including Darcus Howe, were charged with incitement to riot … It was the first judicial acknowledgement of racial prejudice by the police during the Elizabethan age, but it was not the last. ibid.
The Coronation Review of the Royal Navy showcased the most famous fleet in the world. Once defenders of an empire that had circled the globe they gathered here to honour one young woman. Eleven days earlier the 27-year-old Elizabeth II had been crowned Queen … For all the epic splendour, what the young Queen was really seeing that day was the end of an ear. New Elizabethans with Andrew Marr II: A Brave New World
He was one of the most extraordinary, maddening, colourful, fascinating new Elizabethans of them all: Lord Louis Mountbatten. ibid.