Programming note: On Friday, Coronation Eve, Mark will be joining one of his favourite interviewers on The Megyn Kelly Show, live across America at 12 noon Eastern/9am Pacific.
On Saturday, seventy years after the last such occasion, a new Sovereign will be crowned at Westminster Abbey. The world has changed since 1953, and there is little of the glamour and romance that attached to the coronation of this elderly man's young mother. And yet it remains a significant event even for an emaciated British lion and her restive cubs around the planet.
In this special edition of The Mark Steyn Show, Mark revisits some of his coverage of the King and the monarchy over the years, and considers it from all perspectives - the politics and people, the constitution and the Commonwealth. He talks to historians and biographers, a former press secretary and a former speechwriter to the late Queen, a Minister of the Crown and an advisor to the Netflix series The Crown, and Commonwealth commentators from Australia to Rwanda. All know their subject and all have interesting insights to offer.
To watch this extended edition of The Mark Steyn Show, simply click above.
For our Antipodean viewers, you may find our Australian broadcast more convenient: The Steyn Show airs Tuesday to Friday at 5pm Oz Eastern time on ADH TV - your home for Alan Jones, Alexandra Marshall, The Spectator's TV edition and many other fine shows.
~The title of today's show comes from Shakespeare - Henry V's speech on being the recipient of a joke gift of tennis balls from the Dauphin of France:
When we have matched our rackets to these balls,
We will in France, by God's grace, play a set
Shall strike his father's crown into the hazard.
The new Head of the Commonwealth quotes the lines while playing a match of "real tennis" against the dispossessed King of Ruritania in a scene from Steyn's brand new book The Prisoner of Windsor, set in London on the eve of the Coronation of a not terribly popular monarch. Veronica in Auckland enjoyed the real-tennis chapter, as Mark enjoyed writing it, but there's plenty more laughs and some rather poignant passages, too, throughout the book. The Prisoner of Windsor is available in hardback and digital editions.
~If you appreciate these Steyn specials, we'll be doing them live on the Mark Steyn Cruise with many of your favourite guests.
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This edition of The Mark Steyn Show is a special production of The Mark Steyn Club. One advantage of membership is access to our comments section. So, if you take issue with anything said by Starkey, Lacey, Hitchens, or anybody else, then feel free to comment away below.