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    Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret
    Unavailable
    Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret
    Unavailable
    Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret
    Audiobook12 hours

    Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret

    Written by Craig Brown

    Narrated by Eleanor Bron

    3.5/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    The funny and tragic, bestselling biography of The Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, perfect for fans of Netflix’s The Crown.

    A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR • A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • A DAILY MAIL BOOK OF THE YEAR

    ‘I honked so loudly the man sitting next to me dropped his sandwich’ Observer

    She made John Lennon blush and Marlon Brando clam up. She cold-shouldered Princess Diana and humiliated Elizabeth Taylor.

    Andy Warhol photographed her. Jack Nicholson offered her cocaine. Gore Vidal revered her. John Fowles hoped to keep her as his sex-slave. Dudley Moore propositioned her. Francis Bacon heckled her. Peter Sellers was in love with her.

    For Pablo Picasso, she was the object of sexual fantasy. “If they knew what I had done in my dreams with your royal ladies” he confided to a friend, “they would take me to the Tower of London and chop off my head!”

    Princess Margaret aroused passion and indignation in equal measures. To her friends, she was witty and regal. To her enemies, she was rude and demanding.

    In her 1950’s heyday, she was seen as one of the most glamorous and desirable women in the world. By the time of her death, she had come to personify disappointment. One friend said he had never known an unhappier woman.

    The tale of Princess Margaret is pantomime as tragedy, and tragedy as pantomime. It is Cinderella in reverse: hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled.

    Combining interviews, parodies, dreams, parallel lives, diaries, announcements, lists, catalogues and essays, Ma’am Darling is a kaleidoscopic experiment in biography, and a witty meditation on fame and art, snobbery and deference, bohemia and high society.

    ‘Brown has been our best parodist and satirist for decades now … Ma’am Darling is, as you would expect, very funny; also, full of quirky facts and genial footnotes. Brown has managed to ingest huge numbers of royal books and documents without losing either his judgment or his sanity. He adores the spectacle of human vanity’ Julian Barnes, Guardian

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateSep 21, 2017
    ISBN9780008203641
    Unavailable
    Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret
    Author

    Craig Brown

    Craig Brown has been writing the parodic celebrity diary for Private Eye since 1989. He has written for a widevariety of publications, including the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the New Statesman and the Spectator. His books include One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, and Ma’am Darling, which won the James Tait Black award.

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    Reviews for Ma’am Darling

    3.5/5

    123 ratings16 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Bron is great and the book is fun. Haha. Haha.

      I’m sick and it made me not better, not worse. Amused and entertained.
    • 4/5
      She maybe the beauty or the beast ??? as the song goes, but no doubt she was a world icon of her days and was still a fascination during my own. This is a most “delightful” written biography, a “delight” on how it is read, which left me “delighted” indeed.
    • 1/5
      Where is the rest of book? First hour here but it’s meant to be 10 hour approx
    • 4/5
      It is a truth universally acknowledged that Princess Margaret could, at her best, be described as lacking direction, and at worst, a terrible human being. It is also worth remembering that Vanessa Kirby, the wonderful actress who portrays Margaret on The Crown, is not actually Princess Margaret which I had to remind myself of repeatedly.

      The woeful tale of Princess Margaret, as I’ve taken to calling it, is, as some have described, Cinderella in reverse. I disagree. Cinderella, regardless of her circumstances, was still charming and delightful. Which some people seemed to have thought of Princess Margaret, but doesn’t seem to be the prevailing impression of her. However, what one’s personal opinions of the Princess, and whether we should really judge a woman who grew up in a very different era in a very different circumstance than 99.999999999% of the world’s population, is a discussion for a different day. Today, I will try to focus on the book itself, and less on my judgemental opinions of its subject.

      Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret is just that, 99 short vignettes about her life, of which about 90 are true and 9 are hypotheticals – tales of what Margaret’s life would have been had she made a different decision at key, often romantic, points in her life – i.e. married Peter Townsend, been seduced by Picasso, etc. The vignettes are snarky and satirical, which, once I Googled who Craig Brown was in British society, made a great deal more sense than they had before I did a little digging into the author’s background.

      The best analogy I have to Ninety-Nine Glimpses is that of a train/carwreck. It’s terrible, but you just can’t help but stare. Or in this case, turn the pages. Brown covers every bit of her life from the tales of the little princesses’ governess/nanny Crawfie to her later years and the burning of the letters towards the end of her life. If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to be a Queen’s little sister, of which history has given us very few, Ninety-Nine Glimpses is a book for the ages.
    • 5/5
      Craig Brown’s biography of the Queen’s younger sister is playfully subversive of both it’s subject and biography as a form. Brown makes no attempt to write The Definitive Biography of Princess Margaret and, by doing so, may well have written her definitive biography. It’s certainly the funniest one, anyway. Keeping it to a fairly modest 400 pages or so, modest by the blockbusting standards prevalent among biographers that is, Brown avoids the tedium of linear chronology and provides an apparently random sequence of vignettes, reflections and parodies. Wonderfully entertaining.
    • 3/5
      Princess Margaret aroused passion and indignation in equal measures. To her friends, she was witty and regal. To her enemies, she was rude and demanding.In her 1950s heyday, she was seen as one of the most glamorous and desirable women in the world. By the time of her death, she had come to personify disappointment. One friend said he had never known an unhappier woman.The tale of Princess Margaret is pantomime as tragedy, and tragedy as pantomime. It is Cinderella in reverse: hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled.I have to admit I have never been a fan of Princess Margaret. I like the Royal Family but she was one I could never warm to. The book was very interesting giving insights into her life and the other Royals. PM appeared to be someone who had a very high regard for herself, she could be very rude and had no problem letting people know who she was and how she had to be treated. She talked to people as if they were dirt on her shoe…..not a nice woman at all. I suppose she had some good points and there are people who remained loyal to her. Royal or not, I would never have let her talk to me like she did to others. It’s a very readable book but it definitely leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth as far as PM is concerned.
    • 5/5
      Ahh....it is books like this that make the ridiculousness of life seem somehow worth it. There is so much here to marvel at for sheer lunacy and pathos. I don't know what this book would be like for someone who wasn't British and wasn't around at the time of PM. But reading this I guess you could only wish that you were. I'd swap a thousand Trumps for just one PM.

      Best quote: "the most highly paid dwarves in Europe"

      Loved it
    • 2/5
      Found this a bit of a struggle to get through, starts out well but there's only so many bitchy stories you can hear (both from Margaret and against her). The "What-If" chapters are particularly interminable.
    • 2/5
      The beginning which dealt with who Princess Margaret developed into was interesting. Once she gets married the book starts reading like a gossipy website about unpleasant grumpy people, making it hard to stay interested. About 60% of the way into the book I realized I was having to push myself to read it, so I decided the rest wasn't worth the energy. Too much more interesting reading to accomplish.
    • 3/5
      I was always curious about Princess Margaret. I bit before my time so I did not know much other that pictures I had seen. Many of them she seemed rather pretty and in some stunning. I was looking for a biography at the local library and could only come up with this vignette type book.It is rather interestingly composed with short profile type stories on her life in somewhat chronological order. On the gossipy side, many not flattering. We get a glimpse of a woman who was truly caught up in royal stature but ill equipped to make much of a positive of it. Overshadowed by her Queen sister, this no doubt affected her greatly.Her marriage and romances are covered as well as her lifestyle amongst the artsy crowd. Very little is made of her children, in fact they were barely mentioned. Sadly her end is not a happy one as she paid the price for excesses, primarily smoking and drinking. And her loneliness near the end almost seems a payback for her own treatment of others that may have increasingly alienated her.In light of the many royal scandals, other than her famous uncle's abdication she was a forerunner to the those to follow. Yes the royals, endless fodder for the trials and tribulations of their creation.
    • 2/5
      I was so disappointed in this book which had some excellent reviews. The short chapters look at some aspect of Princess Margaret's life. She comes across as extremely self-centered, bitchy, and downright mean to those around her. There was lots of name dropping which seemed at times to become more important that the look at Margaret. Then what was the chapter on the marriage to Pablo Picasso? That didn't happen, did it? I simply gave up on this as it was not the least bit interesting.
    • 4/5
      Mostly-bitchy-with-flashes of empathy take on a woman who is largely portrayed as snobbish and mean. As Brown himself says, it’s not the victors who write history but the writers, and writers make choices. Most of the time he portrays her negatively but there are hints here and there that there might be more to the story. It was fun to read but I did not feel like a very nice person as I cackled along with Brown's catty anecdotes of Margaret's cluelessness and superiority. He hits the appeal of his book on the head in an early chapter about Margaret's appeal to bohemians- her presence made them feel respectable/part of the establishment, but then they could mock her behind her back and feel superior. That's what the whole experience of reading the book was like for me. And I don’t think any of that is appealing to anyone’s better angels.
    • 3/5
      This is a strange, yet revealing biography of Princess Margaret as told through different chapters culled from interviews, memoirs, diaries, and newspaper accounts. We see the princess grown from dewy-eyed ingenue whose first love ends in total heartache to a rather bloated dipsomaniac at the end.She was not a pleasant person, although I had to feel a bit sorry for her as some of the recollections that are related in this book are catty and mean. Life as a royal isn't always fun.
    • 3/5
      This is a very different take on biography. I'm not sure about it, frankly - it was interesting, definitely.
    • 4/5
      Craig Brown is a contributor to Private Eye, & these snapshots show the same fascination & irreverence for public figures. A funny, speedy read about one of the world’s most entitled & selfish women. A Cinderella in reverse, she lazily expected the world to entertain her & became increasingly disappointed. Had me googling her stunning home in Mustique...
    • 3/5
      NOT a bad read. The author starts off strong, with descrriptions of Margaret bering bad.She is super bitchy, but sttrangely just a rich woman spending a ton. Why the Brits don't figure out that the royal family are a bunch of boring but rich old farts is s mystery. Unfortunately, the author reverts to his usual style at the end of the book.