Her award winning biography by James Pope-Hennessy tells the moving story of her relatively impoverished childhood, her very significant reign and her old age as the much admired Queen Dowager who had seen her fiancee, husband and three sons die, and another abdicate, before her own death in 1953. Being an official biography it has all the advantages of access to private papers and people but without any of the restrictions. It is hugely readable, well informed and illuminating.