for all that it is the starkest of realities. And never can the death of a stranger have seemed more real, yet unreal, to most of us than that of Elizabeth II. For how many of us look back on our own lifetimes without always seeing her there in the background too? She was not a fairytale, however age-enchanted the ATS-uniformed young princess alongside Winston Churchill on the Buckingham Palace balcony in 1945 has long seemed to us. She was as real as anything that makes
