“But that’s what she’s there for,” explained the Princess.Īnyone who has watched The Crown knows about the contrast between our reliable, doughty, serene, uneventful Queen and her tempestuous younger sister. Once, when Gore Vidal was gossiping with Princess Margaret, he told her that Jackie Kennedy had found the Queen ‘pretty heavy going’. This is an achievement, not a failing: it was her duty and destiny to be dull, to be as useful and demonstrative as a postage stamp, her life dedicated to the near-impossible task of saying nothing of interest. Yet, miraculously, the Queen has managed to avoid saying anything striking or memorable to anyone. must surely have met more people than anyone else who ever lived.
While the result certainly shows Margaret in all her unreformed brattishness, it also has a certain sympathy for a woman who ended up becoming a caricature of herself, with few ‘friends’ whom she could really trust. He doesn’t pull his punches, but he is not without compassion for Margaret’s fate.
Brown has delved deep into a dizzying range of memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, hearsay, rumours and interviews to create a memorable picture of the Queen’s younger sister. Although standard, respectful royal biographies hold little interest for me – much better to read about people from a few hundred years ago, because the deference has worn off – this proved to be an engrossing read, bubbling over with bon mots and eye-opening stories. I suspect I’m not the only viewer of that surprisingly absorbing series who has sought out Craig Brown’s delicious, scurrilous, gossipy, genre-bending biography of Princess Margaret. I don't know why people want to rot her like that.After finishing the Netflix series of The Witcher, we decided to move on to something more conventional and, since neither of us had yet seen it, plumped for The Crown. Speaking in 2019, Princess Margaret's close friend and lady-in-waiting Anne Tennant, Baroness Glenconner, described Ma'am Darling as "that horrible book, we won't mention the name of the somebody who wrote it.
It was well received by literary critics, with review aggregator Bookmarks reporting zero negative and two mixed reviews among 14 total, indicating "rave" reviews. The book won the 2018 James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the biography category. The book consists of "essays, lists, catalogues, diaries, palace announcements, newspaper cuttings and interviews, as well as parodies". It was published in the United States in 2018 as Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. Ma'am Darling: Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret is a 2017 book on the life of Princess Margaret, sister of Queen Elizabeth II, written by Craig Brown.
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