being "lauded by liberal intellectuals and America's East Coast elite." The US left continues to praise Shawcross's earlier work; for example, in September 2019, Sideshow was cited at length in an opinion piece in The Intercept defending Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As an initial indicator of how his views were shifting, in his 1990 introduction to the revised edition of his 1970 biography of Alexander Dubček, Shawcross wrote: My own principal criticism [of his own 1970 book] is that I did not realize adequately that the experiment of humane Communism, or Socialism with a Human Face, was impossible, perhaps even a contradiction in terms. . . . The last twenty years have shown nothing so much as the catastrophic nature of Communism everywhere. Wherever Communism has triumphed—I think particularly of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—its consequences have been utterly disastrous. In 1992, he wrote an "admiring" biography of Rupert Murdoch. In 1994, about his 1970s journalism from Vietnam, in light of subsequent abuses by the governments of Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos, Shawcross wrote: I think I concentrated too easily on the corruption and incompetence of the South Vietnamese and their American allies, was too ignorant of the inhuman Hanoi regime, and far too willing to believe that a victory by the Communists would provide a better future. Following the attacks of 11 September 2001, he supported the US invasion of Iraq. His 2003 selection by Buckingham Palace to write the authorised biography of the Queen Mother was described as drawing "Shawcross into the bosom of the monarchy in a way rarely enjoyed by any layman", and the resulting book led to him being described as a "royalist writer." The biography was published in 2009, and a collection of letters followed in 2012. He is a pronounced royalist, who is frequently complimentary of the Royal Family, for example in an April 2020 piece for The Spectator on Queen Elizabeth II, titled "Thank God for the Queen": "One happy result of the horrible virus is that it has prompted the Queen to give us not one but two statements of her faith in this country and in God. Together they demonstrate vividly the exquisite, strong but light touch of our almost timeless monarch." In 2006, Shawcross warned of “a vast fifth column” of Muslims in Europe who “wish to destroy us”; we should not shy away from labelling the problem “Islamic fascism”. In a