THE QUEEN UNSEEN

She might be the most written-about woman in the world but the humorist Craig Brown sheds fresh light on the late Monarch in his brilliant new book. CHRISTOPHER WILSON picks his favourite bits...including Her Majesty on Lord Lichfield's drunken collapse and Emperor Hirohito's fish fascination

- Christopher Wilson

SO YOU think you know everything about Queen Elizabeth II - the most written-about sovereign in the history of Britain, if not the world? If so, you're in for a surprise. There are still apparently a million untold stories surrounding her 70-year reign- and the best of them appear in a fabulous new biography by humorist Craig Brown, a royal nut and obsessive collector of lesser-known gems about the woman who still casts a long shadow over our nation, two years after her death.

Brown paints Elizabeth's astonishing life in a very different way to conventional writers and we get much closer to learning what she was REALLY like.

And what he especially loves is the way people lose their reason when confronted with royalty and how they tell others their version of the truth (so often far from it).

Take for example one of the most infamous events in recent royal history, when intruder Michael Fagan broke into Buckingham Palace and ended up sitting on Her Majesty's bed.

A shocking occurrence, and a palpable threat to the sovereign's life. Yet the accounts which later emerged, written by a handful of different biographers, show just how much people can lose the plot when they come to tell a royal story.

Fagan, according to writer Robert Lacey, broke in because he was in love with the Queen. Not so, claimed fellow scribe Nicholas Davies - he was suffering from the delusion he was the son of Nazi leader Rudolf Hess. No, no, wrote Major Colin Burgess he intended to commit suicide in front of her.

No again! According to the TV series The Crown, Fagan told her: "I thought it would be good for you to meet someone normal."

What about Fagan himself? After all he was there, so he should know.

"I don't know why I did it," he bemusedly confessed when someone bothered to ask him. "Something just got into my head.

As Her Majesty herself might have said, recollections may differ!