Well it depends on who writes the history books. When I was at school, history lessons seemed mainly to consist of kings, queens and what they and their hangers-on wore at court and how their knights held jousting competitions. I suppose they were more significant in those times in that they were actually in charge and could chop people's heads off or get their own chopped off. We didn't spend much time learning about the vicissitudes of the nasty, short and brutish lives of ordinary people (except when they got the plague).

The Queen was a peripheral figure on the world stage when you consider the significant events that occurred during her reign. There was Suez, Vietnam, the wars in Palestine, the various dictators who were slaughtering people the world over, including some in her own dominion, the Cold War, the fall of the Soviet Union, the Cuban missile crisis, Winter of Discontent, the miners' strike, the depredations of Thatcher, the invasion of Iraq, the 2008 financial crash, brexit, Putin (stop me, somebody)... she was not involved nor was she an influence (unless you want to stretch a number of points). On top of that she has presided over an incredibly dysfunctional family. She paid only the taxes she chose to pay, her heir inherited her Croesus-like wealth without paying a penny in inheritance tax and her land holdings were, in large part, environmentally destructive. So I'll be remembering her for the wrong reasons. Maybe I shouldn't have dropped history when I was 13...