He is one of the great living figures of recent history. His face is known all over the world and is one of the main tourist attractions of his country. But it is above all the fruitful relationship that Elizabeth II maintains with fiction that has given her a unique place in the world of culture. To the point that the real sovereign is sometimes confused with the fictional character of a series as exciting as it is controversial about her reign, The Crown, which put the Netflix streaming platform on the television throne it had coveted for years. Recently, the Queen of England also plays Miss Marple of royal ancestry in detective novels. What is the secret of this immense power of fascination exercised by the sovereign?
“Ah, the queen… I would say that what makes her attractive can be compared to two sides of the same coin”, argues cultural critic Ben Walters.
“On the one hand, it has been part of most people’s lives since birth. They have always known her, she has always been there, like a kind of maternal presence that has accompanied them through a period of great change and extraordinary upheaval. It’s a real planetary icon that everyone recognizes right away. On the other side, she appears as a calm and reserved figure, almost a mystery. Compared to more outgoing public figures, you don’t really know who she is or what she likes, which makes her a blank canvas on which to project whatever you can imagine.”
A detective in Windsor
Driven by this mixture of fascination and mystery, authors and creators have shown themselves to be increasingly daring. A new step has been taken by Sophia Bennett in Tragic Ball at Windsor. Her Majesty is investigating (Les Presses de la Cité editions). What is daring here is not only to have made Her Majesty the heroine of a detective novel or to have hidden a corpse in the guest quarters of Windsor Castle, but for having plunged the queen into a world of conspiracies and espionage and for recounting her adventures in an absolutely delicious and believable way. Bennett was looking for a character to take the heroine of her children’s books into adult literature, and she
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The country (Madrid)Founded in 1976, six months after Franco’s death, “Le Pays” is the most read newspaper in Spain. A centre-left daily, it belongs to the Spanish editorial group Prisa.
At the end of 2013, elpais.com launched two new editions for its Latin American readers, with their own editors. The first one, The Country Brazil, was developed in Portuguese for its Brazilian readership and has a full-fledged site. The second, America Country, offers differentiated content for its readers in the Americas. Since 2020, The Country Mexico also has its own website and its own editorial staff.
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