Before her death in September 2022, there used to be two failsafe approaches to writing biographies of Queen Elizabeth II. The first was straightforward fawning, in which the flattery was laid on with a trowel and what are rated character defects in most people were reinvented as positive virtues. The second was what might be called the republican convert strategy, in which a paid-up progressive, starting out from a baseline of mild skepticism, ends up charmed by his or her subject’s dutifulness and steely resolve — see, for example, Ben Pimlott’s The Queen (1996), which concludes with the queen, alone in her private quarters, her guests gone, with eyes “flashing with feline humor at the expense of those who had just paid her court.”