“The Queen Mother: The Official Biography”

by William Shawcross (Alfred A. Knopf, 1,120 pgs., $40)

When I asked about reviewing “The Queen Mother: The Official Biography,” the response I got was something like: “It’s 1,100 pages long!” Yes, I said, in my most imperturbable royal voice. But that works out to only about 11 pages a year.

Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother lived to be 101. On her public and private timeline were two world wars, an empire lost, half a century of widowhood — and a British throne that looked a lot more wobbly when she died in 2002 than it did when she was born during the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1900. It’s a throne that might have toppled but for the steely resolve and unrelenting smile that made Adolf Hitler consider her “the most dangerous woman in Europe.”

The QM was a remarkable woman, but what is most remarkable about this official biography is that the QM invited author William Shawcross to make her private material public.

Not public in the way that Princess Diana went public with her tearful and vengeful revelations, about which the Queen Mother noted, “It’s always a mistake to talk about your marriage.” Not public like Prince Charles’ awkward, gut-spilling confessions. But public in opening her journals, tapes and letters to Shawcross.

It’s said that those who know about the royal family don’t talk (or write), and those who talk about it (or write) don’t know. She knew. And by making her archives public, she deftly managed to “keep the old flag flying,” in a favorite turn of phrase, from the great beyond.

Yet we get to read only those letters that her younger daughter, Princess Margaret, didn’t burn, the way Victoria’s youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, expurgated her mother’s papers. While there’s lots about the QM’s known dislike for the American Wallis Simpson, for whom the QM’s brother-in-law King Edward VIII left his throne, Margaret’s epistolary arson leaves us with precious little about the QM’s relationship with Diana, whose letters Margaret destroyed along with sacks of other papers.

As a result, as one reviewer noted, there are many more pages about the late British poet laureate Ted Hughes than about Diana.