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

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Dame Hilary Mantel’s conclusion to her Wolf Hall saga, focusing on the downfall and execution of Henry VIII’s leading courtier, Thomas Cromwell, is surely the most highly anticipated book of 2020. It has been heralded by a popular BBC adaptation of the earlier books ( Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies), an RSC play, and endless column inches discussing anything from Tudor fashion to Mantel’s views on the Harry and Meghan saga. (Racism “is more deeply embedded in people’s consciousness than any of us are willing to admit,” she says. “I hesitate to call her a victim but ... there has been an element of racism in the invective against her.”) Brown has been our best parodist and satirist for several decades now. His distinguished mentors were William Donaldson and Auberon Waugh, and you can often catch an echo of their sly style in his prose. Here is a classic chapter opener: From left to right: Princess Margaret on her 26th birthday in 1956; at a film premiere in 1951; with the Queen Mother in 1951. One almost wonders if Yoko refused to contribute to the book and Craig is holding some type of weird grudge about it 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.

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

Princess Margaret with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at the Royal Film Performance of The Taming Of The Shrew at the Odeon Theatre, Leicester Square, 1967. Photograph: Douglas Miller/Getty Images I think the thing that bothered me the most was that there was a much larger focus on John than any of the others and I didn't quite understand why that was the case. Did I enjoy the topic? 5. Jen made me into an amateur Beatle cognoscenti. This book has so many fabulous insights, details and opinions. I did have a few issues with this however; it did get a bit dense at times and I would find it difficult to read for too long a time. I also thought that there was no logic to the topics that were focused upon. I felt like there were big and small events that were covered in depth and then there would be other big events that were brushed over or just not mentioned at all.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. Hugely entertaining … brilliantly written, with a wonderful sardonic edge but also a thoughtful, at times even moving tone” - Spectator 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. I recommend this to any Beatles fan, even the ones who can't resist pretending they know everything about them. If you sometimes grow tired of the narrative (I begin getting sad right around the time of Revolver when I read books that cover their history chronologically) and just want to remember the good times and memories, by all means grab this book.

Ma’am Darling: : The hilarious, bestselling royal biography Ma’am Darling: : The hilarious, bestselling royal biography

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. 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. Accents might be seen as the failure of speech to match some imaginary norm. What’s odd in Glasgow seems ordinary in Essex, and vice versa; and what was ordinary yesterday seems extraordinary now. In Ma’am Darling, Craig Brown’s recently published (and very entertaining) biographical study of Princess Margaret, the author devotes a chapter to the princess’s stilted encounter in 1981 with Roy Plomley on Desert Island Discs. “Ma’am, have you a big collection of records?” the presenter begins reverentially. “Ears, quate,” says the princess. “Have you kept your old 78s?” Plomley ploughs on. “Oh, ears,” the princess replies, “they’re all velly carefully preserved.”One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time adopts the same "exploded biography" format of Ma'am Darling. As such it is part biography, part anthropology, part memoir, and mixes the humorous with the serious, and the elegiac with the speculative. It combines intriguing minutiae of their day to day lives with broader explorations of their effect on the world, their contemporaries, and future generations. We also discover much about the industry that has grown up around them, and which is every bit as fascinating as their own history.

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

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. Glimpses of the Beatles by Craig Brown is probably one of the most fun books I've read about the Fab Four. 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. Part of a series of books which examines real-life stories that have made newspaper headlines around the world, this looks at scandals of the 20th century, across royal families throughout Europe. 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.Anglophobia certainly exists in Scotland, and the “slightly posh-sounding English” that Dunlop says she speaks probably does make her inimical to the more bigoted nationalist. But in England too that voice has lost friends. Who wants these days to sound posher than the family they were born into? Would I recommend to Jen (smart, discerning reader)? 5. I feel that this is the one book I know Jen would love. Many fewer people speak this way now, and almost none of them can be heard with any regularity on television or radio unless as the subjects of documentaries on impoverished aristocrats, secret fox hunts or elephant polo. The Queen herself no longer sounds as she did – compare last year’s Christmas speech to the one she made in 1957. Like priests abandoning Latin or pundits Sanskrit, what was once known as British “society” has, consciously or otherwise, rejected a form of pronunciation that was exclusive to them, in a vocal effort to blend in with the social classes lower down the scale. This could be read as a failure of confidence, or a way of protecting their position by demonstrating that they are really just like the rest of us. Probably it’s both. George Bernard Shaw writes in the preface to Pygmalion about the impossibility of an Englishman ever opening his mouth “without making some other Englishman hate or despise him”. And who in a democratic-turned-populist age would want to go on living as an advertisement for privilege when a few lessons from a voice coach – of the kind taken, for example, by Samantha Cameron – could help maintain or increase their public esteem? Though this is an extensive collection of scandals starting from the earliest Kings and Queens, it goes up to and includes 20th-century stories too. It is a far cry from harrowing biographies, so perfect for a bit of fun reading to kill time. 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.

Earl of Snowdon to publish new biography on mother Princess

This weekend, an excerpt from Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown, which describes the late princess’s morning routine, made its way around the Internet. 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. 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.” 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.’ 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 RankinShe 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." 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. A biography teeming with the joyous, the ghastly and the clinically fascinating” - Hannah Bett, The Times A cross between biography and satire that perfectly displays Brown’s rare skills as journalist and parodist’, Mark Lawson, Guardian, Books of the Year - A lot of the information here is not new, some are people's reflections so are new to us. But if, rather than play the annoying "I knew all this stuff already" game, you just read and reflect from whatever your connections to them were/are, I think you'll enjoy this. Don't make this a "I'm a bigger fan than you" thing either, there is no single "biggest fan" so get over it. Just remember the joy and happiness you experienced when you were living the moments in your life that they and their music touched. If you want to play a game, play the what if game, what if they had... So many wonderful possibilities but the flip of the coin might have had them tarnishing their legacy. But the disappointment (for fans and music lovers) of an early break up, relatively early deaths, feuds that might not have had to be so enduring, what if...