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Yet speaking to him reveals the specific pressure of keeping terrible secrets in the name of the English aristocracy's so-called "stiff upper lip".

"It's very much having a stiff upper lip," she says.

But she assumed that the stiff upper lip emblematic of elite British society would not make for a compelling documentary — too guarded, too interested in hagiography, too much of an all-around royal pain.

Anyone who has watched the many dramatizations of the queen’s life — including “The Crown” — or the coverage of her death is already well-versed in the problems of always maintaining a stiff upper lip.

The book’s preface opens with a gentle mockery of the myth of Colditz, which locates all detainees’ “mustaches firmly set on stiff upper lips.”