<p><b>In this entertaining and insightful biography, award-winning writer Andrew Morton, author of Diana, Her True Story and Elizabeth &amp; Margaret: The Intimate World of the Windsor Sisters, takes you behind the scenes to uncover the woman and her world.</b><br><br>For years she prayed for her mother to give birth to a son. She longed to be spared her<br>destiny as Britain’s future Queen. Her dream was to live in the country surrounded by<br>children, dogs and horses.<br><br>But Elizabeth did her duty, the young princess pledging before her people that she would<br>dedicate her whole life to the service of Britain and the Commonwealth. She hoped that<br>that day would be a long way off. It was not to be. Only twenty-five when she became<br>Queen after the premature death of her father, King George Vl, Elizabeth has become the<br>stuff of superlatives: <b>the longest reignin</b>g, most travelled and, for a shy woman, the<br>Queen who has shaken more hands and made more small talk than <b>any other monarch</b><br><b>in history</b>. She has been seen and believed by millions, either in person, on television or<br>film.<br><br>Elizabeth was set firmly on the road to becoming sovereign because of the D word –<br>divorce. In 1936, her uncle David, King Edward VIII, wanted to marry a twice-divorced<br>American, Wallis Simpson. When he couldn’t he abdicated. Since that national trauma,<br>divorce and the fall-out from divorce has shaped her reign. She has witnessed her sister<br>Margaret, three of her children and several grandchildren divorce. And she has lived long<br>enough to see the wheel turn full circle, watching as another American divorcee, Meghan<br>Markle, walked down the aisle with her grandson Prince Harry.<br><br>While her reign has been defined by divorce, her private life has been moulded by an<br>irascible husband, an extravagant mother and a querulous eldest son. In the winter of her<br>reign she refereed a war between two of her grandsons, brothers William and Harry who<br>were once inseparable friends. As she celebrates her <b>platinum anniversary, </b>the first<br>monarch to reign for <b>seventy years</b>, she has, during a once in a lifetime pandemic,<br>become the reassuring face of hope and optimism, the grandmother to the nation.</p>