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Published:
January 28, 2021 at 2:54 pm
It’s often claimed that Queen Victoria said the infamous quote – “We are not amused” – to an equerry who had told a risqué joke (the ‘we’ in question was not the royal ‘we’ but the ladies who were present). The phrase has since come to epitomise the perceived strait-laced stuffiness of both the era and its queen. But speaking in an interview in 1976, Victoria’s granddaughter, Alice, Countess of Athlone, said that Victoria herself told her that she never uttered these famous words at all.
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In fact, if the queen’s diaries are anything to go by, Victoria had a keen sense of humour and certainly enjoyed a joke. She had a “wonderful laugh” wrote Vicky of Prussia, “and grandmama often laughed till she was red in the face and even till she cried”. Her voice, says Helen Rappaport on what Queen Victoria looked like, was universally admired for its sweet, bell-like tones and she had a habit of shru
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones responds to listener questions and popular internet search queries about one of the dominant powers of the ancient world, the Persian empire