For many years, Her Majesty the Queen has received a weekly report on the news and issues of the day, known at the Palace as 'The Current Affairs Briefing Document', from one of her senior private secretaries.

She has replied to them in letters which have expressed her private thoughts, and occasionally questions, about what is happening in the world outside.

Now she has decided to allow some of these letters from the last twelve months to appear in the public domain.

They reveal for the first time what she really thinks about attitudes to the Royal Family, about the Prime Ministers she has met, about Helen Mirren, about the great, the good and the mysteriously famous people she meets as she goes about her duties. She shares what it is really like to jump out of a helicopter to open the Olympics, how to deal with a media obsessed with taking pictures of one's grandchildren without their clothes on, or the happy prospect of being a great-grandmother.

Affectionately imagined, Letters from the Queen will provide a view of the way we live now, as seen from the top by someone who is both at the centre of national life and yet removed from it.