Racist, misogynist, reactionary, one-dimensional trash. In Brown's view, foreigners - Japanese (obviously), Indian, Greek - independently worked to destroy the world's greatest pop band. H E Bates - Fair Stood the Wind for France, The Darling Buds of May, The Dreaming Suburb, The Avenue Goes to War

Craig Brown | Books | The Guardian Craig Brown | Books | The Guardian

Well, What Brown does is focus on many of the people peripherally involved with the group. This includes: The funny and tragic, bestselling biography of The Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, perfect for fans of Netflix’s The Crown.

Her older sister may start her day off with cornflakes in Tupperware, but Princess Margaret? Her routine was a little more . . . indulgent, to say the least. Cawthorne details the biggest royal troubles to have hit the media, without much pomp, just in-depth summaries to inform and engage any reader, royal-followers or not.

Tim Adams’s best biographies of 2017 | Biography books | The

British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial ‘gift’ from the railways to the rule of law was designed in Britain’s interests alone.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. He goes on to show how Britain’s Industrial Revolution was founded on India’s deindustrialisation and the destruction of its textile industry. In this bold and incisive reassessment of colonialism, Tharoor exposes to devastating effect the inglorious reality of Britain’s stained Indian legacy. 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.’ 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

The Guardian Best books of 2017 – part one | Hollie McNish | The Guardian

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). 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. Ma’am Darlinglooks at her from many angles, creating a kaleidoscopic biography, and a witty meditation on fame and art, snobbery and deference, bohemia and high society. This biography is perfect for fans of The Crown, shedding light on the reality of the at times hilarious but all too tragic life of the Queen’s little sister.With Julie Andrews, Rex Harrison and Stanley Holloway at the Theatre Royal after a performance of the stage musical My Fair Lady, 1966. Photograph: Reg Speller/Getty Images 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." 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. 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. In the eighteenth century, India’s share of the world economy was as large as Europe’s. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation.