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

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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. One of the traditional problems for the satirist is the transition from short-form to long-form. Brown solved this brilliantly in his previous book, One on One, a 101-chapter daisy chain of improbable but true meetings around the world and across the 20th century, with its end returning to its beginning. In Ma’am Darling he adopts a 99-chapter approach, with each section characterised as a “glimpse”. This allows him the flexibility to drop in a chapter of merely a few lines, and to go off at short or long tangents as the whim takes him – to be himself as much as possible. But quasi-biography, such as he has chosen to write, remains, alas, still a form of biography. There are lives to be described, and motives to be explored, and characters to be moved through time. As early as chapter 11, Brown is chafing at these normal responsibilities of a literary form he considers in the main to be “sheepish and constrained”. Thus, he relates how different people would describe the same princessy event, and yet each of them would describe it somewhat differently, leaving him in a quandary as to which version he should or could believe. To which the world’s biographers would riposte: tell us about it! This is merely base camp for them. Who wants these days to sound posher than the family they were born into? One man at least: Jacob Rees-Mogg 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." In the first annus horribilis of Trump, I found myself reading more periodicals than books – and small magazines rather than the mainstream journals. Gauging the political and cultural earthquakes of our time, such shoestring publications as n+1, the Point, the Baffler, Dissent and Jacobin seemed far more intellectually agile and resourceful than their rich cousins. Mary Beard’s Women and Power (Profile) and Joan Wallach Scott’s Sex and Secularism (Princeton) offer a series of bracing and illuminating reflections on a whole culture of oppression that ought to have been exposed much earlier. Other insidious hierarchies are revealed by Jenny Zhang’s collection of stories, Sour Heart (Bloomsbury Circus), which deliciously subverts conventions of “immigrant literature”. I greatly admired the imaginative range and adventurousness of Kanishk Tharoor’s stories in Swimmer Among the Stars (Picador), and I also very much enjoyed Danzy Senna’s New People (Riverhead), a witty and stylish novel about the allure and perils of racial belonging. Blake Morrison

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time - Goodreads One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time - Goodreads

Jenny Colgan - Christmas at Little Beach Street Bakery, Doctor Who, Welcome to Rosie Hopkins Sweet Shop of Dreams

Brown’s subject is that most beloved of all British bands, The Beatles. He uses a similar style to Ma’am Darling to tell their near-unbelievable story, in which four young boys from Liverpool could first perfect and then reinvent an entire musical form, before separating and drifting apart before their youngest members were even 30. We discover that Wallis Simpson adored them, that Noel Coward loathed them, and that the Queen said, “Think what we would have missed if we had never heard The Beatles.” Brown is a perfect guide, and this is the equal to Ma’am Darling. 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. 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). Becoming Myself: A Psychiatrist’s Memoir (Piatkus) by Irvin D Yalom. When Yalom publishes something – anything – I buy it, and he never disappoints. He’s an amazing storyteller, a gorgeous writer, a great, generous, compassionate thinker, and – quite rightly – one of the world’s most influential mental healthcare practitioners. All Things Remembered (Faber) by Goldie. A fabulous, whirling kaleidoscope of music, memory and trauma. Top highlights: when Goldie’s boa constrictor decides to try to eat him after he staggers home from the pub smelling like a kebab; and when his favourite piece of custom-made jewellery is stolen – right from under his nose – by dodgy Russian airport officials. Magical and cautionary. Navid Kermani’s Wonder Beyond Belief: On Christianity (Polity). Iranian-born, German-bred, Muslim novelist/intellectual Kermani travels the globe looking at significant (and not so significant) Christian artworks. This truly is one of the best books I’ve read in years: funny, outrageous, touching, intimate, glorious. William Boyd

Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret – review

According to the Times, the queen had ‘come to be the symbol of every side of the life of this society, its universal representative in whom her people see their better selves ideally reflected’. That better self had to be reflected in the queen’s family. If the marriage went ahead, ‘the princess will be entering into a union which vast numbers of her sister’s people, all sincerely anxious for her lifelong happiness, cannot in conscience regard as a marriage.’ Vast numbers? All evidence suggests that public opinion was overwhelmingly tolerant of the match. When three of the queen’s four children got divorced a generation later, there was no suggestion that any of them would have to renounce their titles or emoluments, as Haley urged that Margaret should do. But Haley was not finished. ‘That devout men have argued that it is a wrong interpretation of Christianity is not here relevant.’ So the prohibition was not even rooted in scripture. It was based entirely on what Haley thought the public would stand for. 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. 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. A cross between biography and satire that perfectly displays Brown’s rare skills as journalist and parodist’, Mark Lawson, Guardian, Books of the Year - 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.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). One of the great pleasures and surprises of our digital reading age has been the resurgence of the essay. Who predicted that, in all those Computers Are Killing Literature thinkpieces we’ve had to endure? There have been some excellent essay collections this year, many of which carry pieces that started life online, and I’ve been learning new ways to think about the world, and to write about it, from such wonderful writers as Yiyun Li, Reni Eddo-Lodge and especially from Durga Chew-Bose in her collection Too Much and Not the Mood (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). I’ve barely started reading The White Book by Han Kang (Portobello, translated by Deborah Smith), but I can already tell it will be one of my books of the year. Delicate and thoughtful and concise and dense and strong; this is the kind of writing I like to read slowly. A man (of course) recently claimed that 2017 had been “a thin year” for poetry; this has certainly not been the experience of attentive readers. As well as new collections from the likes of Sinéad Morrissey, Emily Berry, Maria Apichella and the very thrilling Ocean Vuong, I have particularly enjoyed getting my head around the playful rhythms and deadpans of Morgan Parker’s There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé (Corsair). Hollie McNish 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

Ma’am Darling: The hilarious, bestselling royal biography

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. Each chapter provides an illuminating vignette which progressively adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It's a social history as much as a musical one. This kaleidoscopic biography of the Fab Four is even better than Ma'am Darling, which is saying something. Their story and influence is perfect for this type of exploration. A joy from start to finish. Glimpses of the Beatles by Craig Brown is probably one of the most fun books I've read about the Fab Four. 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.At first nights, she seldom fails to tell the producer or director how much she loathed the show. To Robert Evans, producer of Love Story, at the Royal Command Performance of the film: ‘Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.’ When Dennis Main Wilson says, ‘Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part,’ she cuts down his faux modesty with: ‘Isn’t that that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?’ At the end of Carousel at the National Theatre, Richard Eyre escorts her to the door: ‘I’m glad you enjoyed the show.’‘I didn’t, I can’t bear the piece.’ What is missing is any sense or appreciation of the music which was the key part of the whole thing. These people who wore rough clothes and then suits, made a couple of films, went to Germany, the USA and India, and were generally followed about by just about everybody... Who were they ?? There's little sense of what was driving the whole thing.

Earl of Snowdon to publish new biography on mother Princess

One almost wonders if Yoko refused to contribute to the book and Craig is holding some type of weird grudge about it 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. 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. 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. Princess Margaret meets Frankie Howerd and Petula Clark at the London Palladium in November 1968. Photograph: Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

Spring was once a quiet time for new books as publishers preferred to focus on the lucrative Christmas market, but that has now changed. Today, many publishers are releasing some of their most interesting, dynamic titles in spring. Here are some of the most eagerly awaited books of 2020, which may inform the nation’s cultural debate for years to come. Ma’am Darling is fascinating. Brown has done something amazing with Ma’am Darling: in my wilder moments, I wonder if he hasn’t reinvented the biographical form” - Observer 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 effect is like one of those sweeping Klimt portraits, in which the comet trail of colourful fragments leaves a lasting, wistful impression of an era on the skids. The book is extremely funny and extremely sad. As Brown says towards the end of it, ‘It is Cinderella in reverse. It is hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled. Nothing is as thrilling as they said it would be; no one is as amusing, as clever, as attractive or as interesting.’ In a chapter of The Atrocity Exhibition called “Princess Margaret’s Facelift”, JG Ballard reflected on the paradox of modern fame and the psychology of the public who sustain it. The stars we elect and revere are both infinitely remote and yet scrutinised in their smallest gesture. “Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures seem to offer us.”