Margaret Lane

Society

The Queen is crowned

• 01 May 2006

Taken from the New Statesman archive, 6 June 1953. Few countesses have written in these pages, but then the novelist and biographer Margaret Lane (1907-94) was an unusually literate one. Not all the readers liked her tone, one protesting: “Next time the New Statesman and Nation is tempted to scoff at the Russians’ banner-waving adulation of a Stalin or a Malenkov, let it re-read its own muffled-royalist lucubrations.” - Brian Cathcart