Clive Irving is a columnist for the Daily Beast in New York. His career in journalism began when the Queen came to the throne. That created a kind of parallel life in which he has tracked the whole arc of the Queen’s reign in various roles – as an investigative reporter at the London Sunday Times, as a television producer, as a magazine editor at Conde Nast in New York and ultimately as a biographer in his book The Last Queen, which is witness to not just the monarch’s evolution but to the enormous cultural, political and social changes in Britain that she had to navigate. He also speaks as an insider about the role of the media in shaping the public perception of the royal family at times of great stress for them.