Counting One's Blessings: Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother - Hardcover

"Has any previous collection of letters spanned Queen Mary, Eleanor Roosevelt, Benjamin Britten and Norwich City Football Club? . . . Here is a fluent narrator who, despite frequent grumbles about journalists, would have made a very good one with her natural eye for the telling detail . . . There are countless fresh insights . . . an enchanting, often moving and sometimes hilarious canter from the Great War to the new millennium with a rider who refuses to slow down" --Daily Mail

"We get her take on two world wars, the abdication, the premature death of her husband and the marriages of her daughters and grandchildren . . . there is something to be said for reading the Queen Mother in her own words, which are embellished with copious capitals, exclamation marks and underlinings" --Sunday Times

"How one warms to her! . . . Precocious historian; shrewd literary critic; discerning gastronome: so much more than a nice old doll in a hat."
--Evening Standard

"Have letters from the same person spanning 92 years ever been published before? . . . The Queen Mother was a leading example of the type that scarcely exists today - a highly intelligent, well-connected woman . . . Such women were often well educated by governesses and well-read . . . they wrote with modesty, precision, spontaneity and with kindness and wit . . . Queen Elizabeth spots small things . . . She can move from the big to the small in a way that illuminates both" --Daily Telegraph

"This book will revive you from any recession blues." --Readers Digest

"These letters have been discreetly and tastefully selected."
--Times

One of the great revelations of William Shawcross's official biography was the Queen Mother's private correspondence. Indeed, The Sunday Times described her letters as `wonderful ... brimful of liveliness and irreverence, steeliness and sweetness.' Now, drawing on the vast wealth of material in the Royal Archives, at Glamis Castle, and elsewhere, Shawcross has put together a selection of those letters. A prolific correspondent from her earliest childhood to the very end of her life, her letters offer readers a vivid insight into the person behind the public face. Full of wit, hilarity, acute observation and a deeply held sense of duty, Queen Elizabeth's letters constitute a chronicle both of her long life and of the twentieth century.