The legendary series of photographs in which the Queen Mother sips a beer became the source of the cover image for a new biography by the Northern Irish writer Gareth Russell, Do Let’s Have Another Drink: The Singular Wit and Double Measures of…

The legendary series of photographs in which the Queen Mother sips a beer became the source of the cover image for a new biography by the Northern Irish writer Gareth Russell, Do Let’s Have Another Drink: The Singular Wit and Double Measures of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. The book reveals little-known and telling stories from the life of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.

Naturally, a good many amusing episodes are bound up with the Queen Mother’s celebrated wit. And the shot with the drink on the cover is no accident either: Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon was a great lover of a small glass of gin and Dubonnet, or of knocking back a pint of beer.

Her long life of 101 years, in all its fullness and contradictions, is presented as a series of sketches, one for each year, beginning with her coming of age during the First World War and the scandalous abdication of her brother-in-law, taking in her relations with her daughters and her experience of the Second World War, and ending with her dislike of Wallis Simpson and Princess Diana.