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Together, these things conjure Margaret in all her dubious glory. Nancy Mitford likened her to a “hedgehog covered in primroses”, but the reader will come to feel this is unfair to hedgehogs. The relationship with Group Captain Townsend is deliciously done: Brown doesn’t buy the schmaltz, lining himself up instead with Prince Philip, who said sarcastically, when the Queen Mother worried about where a future Mrs Townsend might live, that it was “still possible, even nowadays, to buy a house”. I was already thinking of reading a Beatles history when I came across 150 Glimpses, but which one to choose? The choice on offer is overwhelming. So I started on this book with some trepidation. It has taken me six months to read it (I do read several books at the same time, but even for me this is long), and I've loved every second of it. Whenever I felt a bit down, or one of the other books I was reading was getting too depressing, I would read a couple of chapters from 150 Glimpses, and without fail, it would cheer me up to no end. 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.
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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. 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. H E Bates - Fair Stood the Wind for France, The Darling Buds of May, The Dreaming Suburb, The Avenue Goes to War 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. 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.She was just seventeen – you know what I mean!’ sings Paul, to an audience largely composed of young girls who probably have no idea what he means." The war is almost over, the Russians are getting nearer and two young men join the SS. A bad career move, but To Die in Spring is a wonderful, precise, very moving novel by German author Ralf Rothmann (Picador, translated by Shaun Whiteside). Anything Is Possible (Viking) is predictably great because it’s written by Elizabeth Strout, and brilliantly unpredictable – because it’s written by Elizabeth Strout. I like most of the books I read but, now and again, I read one I wish I’d written myself. This year it’s Reservoir 13 (4th Estate), by Jon McGregor. Its structure, pace, detail, tone, humanity – it’s a quiet masterpiece. Jennifer Egan A reissue of this classic title brought up to date with never-before-published material from the original taped interviews and a new introduction by Andrew Morton. This edition reflects on the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the original publication, and on the long-term legacy of Diana, the woman who helped reinvigorate the royal family, giving it a more emotional, human face, and thus helping it move forward into the 21st century. 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. A biography teeming with the joyous, the ghastly and the clinically fascinating” - Hannah Bett, The Times
Ma’am Darling: The hilarious, bestselling royal biography
One of Britain’s most distinguished biographers turns her focus on one of the most vilified woman of the last century. Historian Anne Sebba has written the first full biography of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, by a woman which attempts to understand this fascinating and enigmatic American divorcee who nearly became Queen of England. ‘That woman’, as she was referred to by the Queen Mother, became a hate figure for allegedly ensnaring a British king. She nevertheless became one of the most talked about women of her generation, and inspired such deep love and adoration in Edward VIII that even giving up a throne and an empire for her was not enough to prove his total devotion. There are events in here that any beatles fan knows well, take for instance their first appearance on the ed sullivan show. In the beatles anthology docu-series we see the performance, accompanied by talking heads of the band members remembering the moment. Brown explodes it, reminding us that JFK was assassinated months prior, leading to a lingering unease in the US, which some say the beatles helped to heal. He takes you into the lives of other people on the show that night, a comedy duo who messed up due to the uninterested reaction of the audience who were only there for one thing, whose professional career would never recover leading them into obscurity. And then it takes you into the lives of the numerous people, of all different locations, ages and walks of life, that were deeply affected by the performance and whose lives were all subsequently changed. It's this keen eye for recontextualising and constantly following different viewpoints and narrative tributaries that makes the whole thing so hugely powerful, completely transforming the details you thought you knew and had taken for granted.When a giant quake and wave hit Japan in 2011, almost all the children who died came from one primary school. Richard Lloyd Parry’s Ghosts of the Tsunami (Cape) describes the errors that led to the tragedy and the efforts of bereaved parents to uncover the truth. Sigrid Rausing’s taut, scrupulous, self-accusing memoir Mayhem (Hamish Hamilton) recounts the story of her sister-in-law’s death from a drug overdose: instead of tabloid sensationalism, we watch a family tragedy unfold. Richard Ford’s Between Them (Bloomsbury) is a loving, late-life tribute to his father Parker (a travelling salesman) and mother Edna: concise, contemplative and evocative of a lost America. The linked stories in Elizabeth Strout’s Anything Is Possible (Viking) are among the best fiction I’ve read this year, and the poems in Simon Armitage’s The Unaccompanied (Faber) the best verse. Ian Rankin Drawing on extensive access to the Royal Family’s inner circle, Sally Bedell Smith delivers unprecedented insights into Prince Charles, a man who possesses a fiercely independent spirit, and yet has spent his life in waiting for the ultimate role. For the very first time,Finding Freedom goes beyond the headlines to reveal unknown details of Harry and Meghan’s life together, dispelling the many rumours and misconceptions that plague the couple on both sides of the pond. As members of the select group of reporters that cover the British Royal Family and their engagements, Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand have witnessed the young couple’s lives as few outsiders can.
Review: Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by
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). 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. One almost wonders if Yoko refused to contribute to the book and Craig is holding some type of weird grudge about it Prince Andrew’ investigates the story of the key players and allegations and counter-allegations in this unique, high-stakes royal drama. It provides a gripping and uncommon insight into the hidden privileges enjoyed by global power brokers, royalty and billionaires. Transcending the life of one man, it characterises a whole institution and a way of life – the monarchy as we know it today.I enjoyed the breadth of topics that were covered within this and I found it interesting throughout. It's endlessly amusing to read quotes from music journalists stating that The Beatles will never last. 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).
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