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Prince Andrew’ investigates the story of the key players and allegations and counter-allegations in this unique, high-stakes royal drama. It provides a gripping and uncommon insight into the hidden privileges enjoyed by global power brokers, royalty and billionaires. Transcending the life of one man, it characterises a whole institution and a way of life – the monarchy as we know it today. Anyone who has ever enjoyed Craig Brown’s pitch-perfect satirical writing for Private Eye will know how incredibly gifted he is at imitating (and ridiculing) specific voices and characters, but his 2017 book Ma’am Darling did something altogether more challenging and successful. Brown produced an anti-biography of sorts about Princess Margaret, using everything from interviews to fantasy to produce a kaleidoscopic life of a complex character. It won the James Tait Prize and fans were itching for this follow-up. 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. 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.
Ma’am Darling: : The hilarious, bestselling royal biography Ma’am Darling: : The hilarious, bestselling royal biography
Did I enjoy the topic? 5. Jen made me into an amateur Beatle cognoscenti. This book has so many fabulous insights, details and opinions. 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. 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 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. 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.’I loved this book so much but also it made me slightly unwell? It was like I contracted this super specialized strain of anhedonia, where nothing gave me pleasure but talking, reading, and thinking about the Beatles. I was a walking talking insufferable fount of Beatles anecdotes, incapable of shutting up. My husband was like, "...I think there were other things going on in the sixties aside from the Beatles." And I was like, "Sure, Jan." 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 Princess Margaret meets Frankie Howerd and Petula Clark at the London Palladium in November 1968. Photograph: Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images
Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig
Peter Kemp in The Sunday Times is a rare negative voice when he writes that it is “more a phenomenon of amassed information and tireless enthusiasm than triumphant creativity”. More typical is the critic Stephanie Merritt’s judgment that “ The Mirror and the Light is a masterpiece”, and she goes on to praise the trilogy as “the greatest English novels of this century”. The events Mantel depicts are well-known, but the flair and brilliance of her writing make this finale more Bourne Ultimatum than Return of the Jedi.
H E Bates - Fair Stood the Wind for France, The Darling Buds of May, The Dreaming Suburb, The Avenue Goes to War Glimpses of the Beatles by Craig Brown is probably one of the most fun books I've read about the Fab Four. Brown has done something amazing with Ma’am Darling: in my wilder moments, I wonder if he hasn’t reinvented the biographical form. Subtitled 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, it is described by his publisher (which, infuriatingly, hasn’t given him an index) as “kaleidoscopic”. But this doesn’t do it justice. It is a cubist book, a collection of acute angles through which you see its subject and her world (and, to an extent, our world) anew. Brown takes the fantasy a stage further by imagining how married life would have worked out for Pablo and Margaret. This is one of a series of counterfactual episodes spattered through the book: what if she had married Peter Townsend after all, what if she had married Jeremy Thorpe, another improbable contender for her hand, what if she had become queen instead of her sister? These capriccios melt beautifully into the text, because we are immersed in a land of dreams. Being a communist or a homosexual is no barrier here to imagining yourself walking up the aisle of Westminster Abbey with the royal trumpeters at full blast. 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.
Tim Adams’s best biographies of 2017 | Biography books | The
Hugely entertaining … brilliantly written, with a wonderful sardonic edge but also a thoughtful, at times even moving tone” - SpectatorBrown’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. The war is almost over, the Russians are getting nearer and two young men join the SS. A bad career move, but To Die in Spring is a wonderful, precise, very moving novel by German author Ralf Rothmann (Picador, translated by Shaun Whiteside). Anything Is Possible (Viking) is predictably great because it’s written by Elizabeth Strout, and brilliantly unpredictable – because it’s written by Elizabeth Strout. I like most of the books I read but, now and again, I read one I wish I’d written myself. This year it’s Reservoir 13 (4th Estate), by Jon McGregor. Its structure, pace, detail, tone, humanity – it’s a quiet masterpiece. Jennifer Egan
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