A feminist? Perhaps not. But the Queen helped to show women what was possible | Rachel Cooke

At a time when men still wielded all the power, the young Elizabeth was a vital role model. It meant, at least, one female in official photographs

The past is sometimes less of a foreign country than you might imagine. On Friday morning, when my husband wondered aloud if we should get a new television for the funeral" (ours is comically small), my mind turned not to the John Lewis website, but to the coronation, the generations connected, even now, by the allure of an outside broadcast.

In 1953, the question of how and where events at Westminster Abbey might be watched was, for most of the population, somewhat pressing. As the year began, fewer than two million people owned a television set.

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