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

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His reading has been prodigious: not only the diaries of everyone from Chips Channon to AL Rowse, but dozens of gruesome royal biographies and memoirs, up to and including My Life With Princess Margaret by her former footman, the slithering David John Payne. Oh, how the sinister Payne loathes the arrival in Ma’am’s life of the slugabed snapper Armstrong-Jones – a character whom Brown introduces, incidentally, with a list of the contents of his Rotherhithe bachelor pad (golden cage containing three lovebirds; miniature brass catafalque; stand in the shape of a Nubian boy). 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. Brown is also as concerned with the innumerable people who missed out on fame than the few that achieved it; one of the most moving snapshots is a deep dive into the life of Jimmie Nichol, who is elsewhere a tiny footnote in the story of the band. He replaced Ringo as their drummer for only a week or two but the repercussions of that time would alter his entire life. It is one of the many many instances that manages to find incredible untrodden ground in one of the most chronicled artefacts of modern history. With unique access and written with the participation of those closest to the couple,Finding Freedomis an honest, up-close, and disarming portrait of a confident, influential, and forward-thinking couple who are unafraid to break with tradition, determined to create a new path away from the spotlight, and dedicated to building a humanitarian legacy that will make a profound difference in the world.

Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown review - The Guardian

Jenny Colgan - Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery, Doctor Who, Welcome to Rosie Hopkins Sweet Shop of Dreams A cross between biography and satire that perfectly displays Brown’s rare skills as journalist and parodist’, Mark Lawson, Guardian, Books of the Year - Nor did she always receive a warmer welcome within her own family. The queen never ceased to be fond of her and, later, sorry for her, but she was busy being queen. In the Townsend crisis, the queen mother offered her little or no help. The queen’s secretary Martin Charteris thought that ‘she was not a mother to her child. When the princess attempted to broach the subject, her mother grew upset, and refused to discuss it.’ The queen mother’s dislike of unpleasantness was legendary. She refused to visit her most loyal courtiers when they were dying. One old lady in waiting is said to have actually died at Clarence House, just before one of the queen mother’s famous lunches under the cedar tree in the garden. Her body was shunted into a side room and HM was not informed until the lunch was over, so as not to spoil the fun. When they were both invalids, Princess Margaret was more than once spotted pinching her mother’s wheelchair. 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. 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.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. A playful, impish approach…Brown gives us lots of wonderful incidental detail…The deftly amused writing constantly tugs the corners of your mouth upwards” - Evening Standard The last "Glimpse" I'll share is a commonly known one, when The Beatles played their last public concert on the roof of their business entity Apple Corp. which was on Savile Row in London. This was a street of pricey bespoke tailor shops and other businesses, and soon irate phone calls were received by the police station because of the noise. So here is a personal recounting from a young police officer, sharing how none of the police wanted to do anything like arrest The Beatles, and how they went up to the roof. He couldn't believe it when he was suddenly standing near Ringo. Well, this young police officer became Princess Diana's personal protection officer in 1988. His name? Ken Wharfe. 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. 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.

Ma’am Darling: The hilarious, bestselling royal biography

It's comprised of 150 short chapters, offering glimpses of the band at different points in their history. It is not meant to be an exhaustive study but it is put together in a way that keeps the reader enthralled - a mixture of interviews, fan letters, autobiography and much more. Above all, it gives an idea of what it must have been like to live through the most thrilling era of pop music, with an inside view of the most important band that ever existed.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: : The hilarious, bestselling royal biography Ma’am Darling: : The hilarious, bestselling royal biography

Her camp followers – never was that phrase more apt – scarcely waited till she had left the room before they started bitching about her, usually in snobbish terms. The snobbery is equally distributed between left and right. Christopher Isherwood called her ‘quite a common little thing’. Richard Eyre said that ‘if it weren’t for the sharp English upper-class voice, you’d say she looks like a Maltese landlady.’ Cecil Beaton described her as vulgar and later as ‘a poor midgety brute’ who had ‘gone to pot … her complexion now a dirty negligee pink satin’. Only matched by Alan Clark’s diary entry: ‘fat, ugly, dwarflike, lecherous and revoltingly tastelessly behaved’ (from a master of deportment). The emphasis on her small stature was almost universal. It was the cruellest thrust, and one suspects a deliberate one, when her husband (himself no giant) made a TV documentary about midgets, which Margaret gamely described as ‘not my cup of tea at all. Bit too near home, I’m afraid.’ Yet they all went on angling and wangling. Her presence lured every star in Hollywood to the party Tynan threw for her. At her funeral and memorial service, the camp followers were out in force, scurrying home to their diaries to confide afterwards how awful she had been.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.