All of us here are very sad to report that the queen of country music, Loretta Lynn, died this morning at 90. Her family said she passed away peacefully in her sleep at home in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee.

Her reign of 70 years and 214 days was the longest of any female head of state and the second longest of any monarch, after France’s King Louis XIV.

Queen Elizabeth was everything that exemplified the best of Great Britain and the Commonwealth, a rarefied sense of human decency that already seems like an archetype from an earlier age.