Ma’am Darling: : The hilarious, bestselling royal biography, perfect for fans of The Crown: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret

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Worst (and most off-putting) was the author’s snooty “above it all” attitude with a lot of the people he interviews (notable examples, his evisceration of Beatles tour experiences, his interview with a former Quarryman) Having thoroughly enjoyed Craig Brown's wonderful Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, I was keen to read his next offering One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time (2020). Brown has done something amazing with Ma’am Darling: in my wilder moments, I wonder if he hasn’t reinvented the biographical form. Subtitled 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, it is described by his publisher (which, infuriatingly, hasn’t given him an index) as “kaleidoscopic”. But this doesn’t do it justice. It is a cubist book, a collection of acute angles through which you see its subject and her world (and, to an extent, our world) anew. I recommend this to any Beatles fan, even the ones who can't resist pretending they know everything about them. If you sometimes grow tired of the narrative (I begin getting sad right around the time of Revolver when I read books that cover their history chronologically) and just want to remember the good times and memories, by all means grab this book.

Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown review - The Guardian

We go through the Beatles success in America; through pivotal moments, fan letters and memories of those who witnessed the madness of the first American tour. Inane press conferences, fires on planes. Their relationship with the Stones, meeting Elvis, and even the views of the literary establishment, are analysed. As are those around the Beatles, such as Aunt Mimi. Again, we have the interesting take of memories from those who were there and modern, idealised versions. Such as Cynthia Lennon’s, and others, memories of Mimi, compared to fans comments on YouTube; drifting off to famous aunt’s in literature. Who wants these days to sound posher than the family they were born into? One man at least: Jacob Rees-Mogg Though this is an extensive collection of scandals starting from the earliest Kings and Queens, it goes up to and includes 20th-century stories too. It is a far cry from harrowing biographies, so perfect for a bit of fun reading to kill time. H E Bates - Fair Stood the Wind for France, The Darling Buds of May, The Dreaming Suburb, The Avenue Goes to War A biography teeming with the joyous, the ghastly and the clinically fascinating” - Hannah Bett, The TimesDame Hilary Mantel’s conclusion to her Wolf Hall saga, focusing on the downfall and execution of Henry VIII’s leading courtier, Thomas Cromwell, is surely the most highly anticipated book of 2020. It has been heralded by a popular BBC adaptation of the earlier books ( Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies), an RSC play, and endless column inches discussing anything from Tudor fashion to Mantel’s views on the Harry and Meghan saga. (Racism “is more deeply embedded in people’s consciousness than any of us are willing to admit,” she says. “I hesitate to call her a victim but ... there has been an element of racism in the invective against her.”) The title captures pretty well what we have here - 150 short chapters, of moments in the Beatles' lives, in the lives of people around the Beatles, in the lives of the millions who loved their music. Some stories you will have heard before, although probably not as detailed, and if you're like me, most will be completely new to you. Accents might be seen as the failure of speech to match some imaginary norm. What’s odd in Glasgow seems ordinary in Essex, and vice versa; and what was ordinary yesterday seems extraordinary now. In Ma’am Darling, Craig Brown’s recently published (and very entertaining) biographical study of Princess Margaret, the author devotes a chapter to the princess’s stilted encounter in 1981 with Roy Plomley on Desert Island Discs. “Ma’am, have you a big collection of records?” the presenter begins reverentially. “Ears, quate,” says the princess. “Have you kept your old 78s?” Plomley ploughs on. “Oh, ears,” the princess replies, “they’re all velly carefully preserved.” A shy man married a jolly woman. Jacob was the fourth of five children. He had some of his father’s accent but little of his shyness. His persona probably combines his mother’s sense of fun with his father’s self-importance, but to a large extent he’s self-invented. The theatrical drawl and the good suits make him a retro figure who seems to come from an older England of accents and classes, layered like geological strata, everyone knowing their place. His supporters, who know they can never sound as fine as he does, are drawn like moths to a most superior lamp. She had been a wilful and mischievous child, unlike her dutiful elder sister. In that notorious book The Little Princesses, their nanny Marion Crawford, ‘Crawfie’, who looked after them for 15 years, described how she would mimic Lilibet’s methodical preparations for going to bed. Crawfie was never forgiven for the book. There was no royal wreath at her funeral. Margaret said simply: ‘she sneaked.’

Princess Margaret Had a Luxuriously Self-Indulgent Morning

Best when entertainingly recalling tidbits and Beatles anecdotes, especially the effect they had on individuals who later became famous musicians, and how politicians (some more successful than others) attempted to leverage their image to support their agendas Anyone who has ever enjoyed Craig Brown’s pitch-perfect satirical writing for Private Eye will know how incredibly gifted he is at imitating (and ridiculing) specific voices and characters, but his 2017 book Ma’am Darling did something altogether more challenging and successful. Brown produced an anti-biography of sorts about Princess Margaret, using everything from interviews to fantasy to produce a kaleidoscopic life of a complex character. It won the James Tait Prize and fans were itching for this follow-up. As for the archbishop, he managed to radiate adamantine certainty. In fact the Church’s position on divorce and remarriage was under extreme pressure. The Church of England had landed itself with the sternest prohibitions of any church, having shunned the Catholic let-out of annulment at a price. But what scriptural authority could these rules claim? Yes, Jesus had said that ‘those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’ But what about those who had sundered? How was the Church to apply its message of compassion to them? Wallis lived by her wit and her wits, while both her apparent and alleged moral transgressions added to her aura and dazzle. Accused of Fascist sympathies, having Nazi lovers and learning bizarre sexual techniques in China, she was the subject of widespread gossip and fascination that has only increased with the years. Until the 1960s, it was the other way around. Accents were continually upgraded. “An honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club,” Shaw wrote in the same preface (a less well-known sentence, in which the Irish playwright displays the snobbery he was chastising the English for a paragraph or two before). But not many working-class people shared that view. It was good to speak proper: you got on that way.Fisher himself admitted that Jesus had left no instructions. He had left the Church free to find its way, in reliance on his Holy Spirit. Fisher did not wish to shelter behind an unyielding rigorism. Second marriages could be spiritually blessed. In the past, the Church had made exceptions to its rules, but it could no longer afford to do so. Since 1857, the C of E had been pushed in the direction of stricter discipline, because ‘the mounting tide of divorce was threatening to overthrow the whole Christian conception of marriage.’ So the stricter standards were new . They didn’t derive from the teachings of Jesus. They were a last-ditch attempt to hold the line. The royal family was to be deployed as an instrument of social control. And in fact Fisher succeeded in pushing through Convocation two years later an act which sought to deprive priests of their old discretion to marry divorcees.

Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret - 4th Estate

As Brown notes, Margaret wore her rudeness as Tommy Cooper did his fez: it was her trademark – the bitchier of her showbusiness friends actively longed for her to parade it at their parties so that they could roll their eyes afterwards. (“I hear you’ve completely ruined my mother’s old home,” she once said to an architect who’d been working on Glamis Castle. Of the same man, disabled since childhood, she also asked: “Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and seen the way you walk?”) But if she is ghastly, her court is worse. The groupies, the servants, the lovers. What a bunch of creeps. I wouldn't call myself a massive fan of The Beatles, even though I've always enjoyed their music. I probably prefer reading about them than listening to them, being as culturally significant as they are. And this book, which won the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, is the best thing I've read about them in some time. From left to right: Princess Margaret on her 26th birthday in 1956; at a film premiere in 1951; with the Queen Mother in 1951. Some of you may remember an American sci-fi show from the '80s, called Quantum Leap. In it, a physicist gets caught in his own quantum time machine, willy-nilly jumping from one historical moment to the next, taking over a person's body for a short while. Reading this book will have you, dear reader, quantum leaping through Beatles history. On learning of the affair, Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, private secretary to the new queen, told Townsend: ‘you must be either mad or bad.’ Within a month, he had persuaded Churchill to exile Townsend to Brussels as air attaché, without even giving him time to say goodbye. I once met Lascelles when I was at school, and was startled by his explosion of venom against the Duke of Windsor, whose private secretary he had been before the war. He was memorably unpleasant. The hope was that the separation would cool their love. But on his return two years later, Townsend said that ‘our feelings for one another had not changed.’ By now, Margaret was 25, and was free under the Royal Marriages Act to marry without the queen’s consent. It was time for the establishment to bring up the big guns. On 1 October 1955, Anthony Eden informed the princess that the cabinet had agreed that if she went ahead with the marriage, she would have to renounce her royal rights and her income from the Civil List. In deploying this threat, the government could scarcely be said to be responding to popular hostility to the match. Gallup found that 59 per cent approved of it and only 17 per cent disapproved. So was it the Church of England’s influence? Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, a famous thrasher in his days as headmaster of Repton, was interviewed on TV by Richard Dimbleby on 2 November, two days after the announcement that the marriage would not happen. Fisher maintained that the decision had been the princess’s alone and that ‘there was no pressure from Church or State.’ This was a barefaced lie. We have seen the blunt financial threat from Eden. True, on her meeting with Fisher on 27 October, the princess did indeed say that she had come not to seek his guidance but to tell him of her decision. But at an earlier dinner with him, on 19 October, he had earnestly counselled her to call it off. There was also an extraordinary leader in the Times on 26 October, which has all the portentous fingerprints of the editor, Sir William Haley.

Hugely entertaining … brilliantly written, with a wonderful sardonic edge but also a thoughtful, at times even moving tone” - Spectator Based on new archives and material recently made available, this scrupulously researched biography re-evaluates the role of politicians in the 1930s, sheds new light on the character and motivations of this powerful, charismatic and complex woman. Some chapters are short, a few a lot longer. What each chapter certainly has, is a real sense of presence. You feel part of the moment, making it so much more enjoyable. There are big moments (say, the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show), and there are many more little moments, full of delightful little details (if all true - more on that later) that humanise these people.