It all begins when one of the royal corgis wanders into a mobile library and HMQ feels obliged to take a book out. Once bitten by the reading bug, there"s no stopping her, and she"s soon devouring classics from Proust and Turgenev to Trollope and Hardy. She"s not uncritical but her girlish inquisitiveness and haughty impatience make a pleasing, plausible combination – "Oh, do get on", she chides Henry James. But best of all, she finally gets to stop being that construct we know as the Queen. As Bennett puts it, "Here in these pages and between these covers she could go unrecognised". And, when reading leads her to writing, there"s a suggestion that she might at last find the self that readers are forever seeking in all those royal biographies.