Mark Lilla’s The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics (Harper) has annoyed a great many people in the US, though its message is nothing but common sense: in the age of Trumpery, nothing can be done for vulnerable minorities unless liberals get themselves elected to positions of influence. 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 then read out her lines of dialogue with Jack Woolley and Caroline Sterling in a “curiously flat and uninvolved” manner.

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

In deploying this threat, the government could scarcely be said to be responding to popular hostility to the match. 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. The reason usually given is that she was outraged when Townsend wrote to tell her that he was engaged to be married to a young Belgian girl, breaking their (not very realistic) pact that neither would ever marry anyone else.

To live on the receiving end of so much gush and so much abuse, to be simultaneously spoilt rotten and hopelessly infantilised, how well would any of us stand up to it? Three weeks after their wedding, Camilla Fry, the wife of Armstrong-Jones’s old friend, gave birth to a daughter, the first of his irregular offspring scattered around the country during and after his marriage to Margaret. They met at the Sunday Times in the early 1960s, when William was the city editor and Gillian his secretary. And so maybe Brown is right, and biography, “sheepish and constrained”, would be an inappropriate literary form to apply to her.

Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown review - The Guardian

Remarkably, it is taken from the true story of Peter Manuel, one of the last men to be hanged in Scotland. One of the stranger and more bookish rumours about the princess, vented by a reviewer in the TLS, is “that Princess Margaret, having read Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, craved to see Nether Stowey. It was like looking at some piece of folk art in a museum, encouraging the notion that the dialect was ill suited to modernity.Some of the keenest observations come from Sellers’s then-wife Britt Ekland and the National Theatre directors, Peter Hall and Richard Eyre, who had to suffer Margaret’s scoffing philistinism. There are lives to be described, and motives to be explored, and characters to be moved through time. 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. His distinguished mentors were William Donaldson and Auberon Waugh, and you can often catch an echo of their sly style in his prose. Other insidious hierarchies are revealed by Jenny Zhang’s collection of stories, Sour Heart (Bloomsbury Circus), which deliciously subverts conventions of “immigrant literature”.

Always the Same Dream: Princess Margaret Ferdinand Mount · Always the Same Dream: Princess Margaret

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. This homage to Raymond Queneau, for all its facility and bravura, remains functionally inert; though it’s easy to imagine Brown’s relief at having ticked off another of his 99 chapters. Asked to sign the visitors’ book, Brown leafed nosily through it, at which point he discovered a photograph of Margaret, posing in the same hallway in which he stood, resplendent in a blue frock and fixed smile.Then she’d spend an hour in the bath and, after a lengthy primping session, had a “vodka pick-me-up” at precisely 12:30. Here are some of the most eagerly awaited books of 2020, which may inform the nation’s cultural debate for years to come. There was also an extraordinary leader in the Times on 26 October, which has all the portentous fingerprints of the editor, Sir William Haley. When they were both invalids, Princess Margaret was more than once spotted pinching her mother’s wheelchair.

Ma’am Darling: The hilarious, bestselling royal biography

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. Since she was royal, the most satisfying way to diminish her was to imply that she was the opposite of royal. Knowing that she was on the Aga Khan’s yacht moored below the windows of the villa in Sardinia where he was staying, Cyril Connolly was desperate to clamber aboard, saying that not to meet the Snowdons was ‘like being in the Garden of Eden without seeing God’. 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. 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.This short head-butt of a book taught me more about recent political events in a single rich evening of reading than I’ve learned in this entire last and very unpleasant year of obsessively monitoring cable TV, and confirmed for me something I’ve been feeling for a while now, namely that social media is a toxin we are gleefully and cluelessly injecting into ourselves, even as we ask, “Why are we getting so mean and stupid?