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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. On learning of the affair, Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, private secretary to the new queen, told Townsend: ‘you must be either mad or bad.’ Within a month, he had persuaded Churchill to exile Townsend to Brussels as air attaché, without even giving him time to say goodbye. I once met Lascelles when I was at school, and was startled by his explosion of venom against the Duke of Windsor, whose private secretary he had been before the war. He was memorably unpleasant. The hope was that the separation would cool their love. But on his return two years later, Townsend said that ‘our feelings for one another had not changed.’ By now, Margaret was 25, and was free under the Royal Marriages Act to marry without the queen’s consent. It was time for the establishment to bring up the big guns. On 1 October 1955, Anthony Eden informed the princess that the cabinet had agreed that if she went ahead with the marriage, she would have to renounce her royal rights and her income from the Civil List. In deploying this threat, the government could scarcely be said to be responding to popular hostility to the match. Gallup found that 59 per cent approved of it and only 17 per cent disapproved. So was it the Church of England’s influence? Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, a famous thrasher in his days as headmaster of Repton, was interviewed on TV by Richard Dimbleby on 2 November, two days after the announcement that the marriage would not happen. Fisher maintained that the decision had been the princess’s alone and that ‘there was no pressure from Church or State.’ This was a barefaced lie. We have seen the blunt financial threat from Eden. True, on her meeting with Fisher on 27 October, the princess did indeed say that she had come not to seek his guidance but to tell him of her decision. But at an earlier dinner with him, on 19 October, he had earnestly counselled her to call it off. There was also an extraordinary leader in the Times on 26 October, which has all the portentous fingerprints of the editor, Sir William Haley. 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. As Craig Brown points out there have already been many excellent books about the Beatles - so what's the point of another one? As this sweeping biography shows, Prince Charles is more complicated and compelling than we knew, until now.
Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown review - The Guardian
One almost wonders if Yoko refused to contribute to the book and Craig is holding some type of weird grudge about it Did it keep my interest? 4. 150 chapters, which are little beautiful Beatle blurbs. Twenty engaging hours of stories As Brown notes, Margaret wore her rudeness as Tommy Cooper did his fez: it was her trademark – the bitchier of her showbusiness friends actively longed for her to parade it at their parties so that they could roll their eyes afterwards. (“I hear you’ve completely ruined my mother’s old home,” she once said to an architect who’d been working on Glamis Castle. Of the same man, disabled since childhood, she also asked: “Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and seen the way you walk?”) But if she is ghastly, her court is worse. The groupies, the servants, the lovers. What a bunch of creeps. In the first annus horribilis of Trump, I found myself reading more periodicals than books – and small magazines rather than the mainstream journals. Gauging the political and cultural earthquakes of our time, such shoestring publications as n+1, the Point, the Baffler, Dissent and Jacobin seemed far more intellectually agile and resourceful than their rich cousins. Mary Beard’s Women and Power (Profile) and Joan Wallach Scott’s Sex and Secularism (Princeton) offer a series of bracing and illuminating reflections on a whole culture of oppression that ought to have been exposed much earlier. Other insidious hierarchies are revealed by Jenny Zhang’s collection of stories, Sour Heart (Bloomsbury Circus), which deliciously subverts conventions of “immigrant literature”. I greatly admired the imaginative range and adventurousness of Kanishk Tharoor’s stories in Swimmer Among the Stars (Picador), and I also very much enjoyed Danzy Senna’s New People (Riverhead), a witty and stylish novel about the allure and perils of racial belonging. Blake MorrisonOne 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. 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. The funny and tragic, bestselling biography of The Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, perfect for fans of Netflix’s The Crown. One of the traditional problems for the satirist is the transition from short-form to long-form. Brown solved this brilliantly in his previous book, One on One, a 101-chapter daisy chain of improbable but true meetings around the world and across the 20th century, with its end returning to its beginning. In Ma’am Darling he adopts a 99-chapter approach, with each section characterised as a “glimpse”. This allows him the flexibility to drop in a chapter of merely a few lines, and to go off at short or long tangents as the whim takes him – to be himself as much as possible. But quasi-biography, such as he has chosen to write, remains, alas, still a form of biography. There are lives to be described, and motives to be explored, and characters to be moved through time. As early as chapter 11, Brown is chafing at these normal responsibilities of a literary form he considers in the main to be “sheepish and constrained”. 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. To which the world’s biographers would riposte: tell us about it! This is merely base camp for them. 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.
Craig Brown | Books | The Guardian Craig Brown | Books | The Guardian
With unique access and written with the participation of those closest to the couple,Finding Freedomis an honest, up-close, and disarming portrait of a confident, influential, and forward-thinking couple who are unafraid to break with tradition, determined to create a new path away from the spotlight, and dedicated to building a humanitarian legacy that will make a profound difference in the world. Beginning with his lonely childhood, Smith details his intellectual quests, his entrepreneurial pursuits, and his love affairs, from the tragedy of his marriage to Diana to his eventual reunion with Camilla, as well as his relationship with the next generation of royals, including Will, Kate, Harry, and his beloved grandchildren.Her camp followers – never was that phrase more apt – scarcely waited till she had left the room before they started bitching about her, usually in snobbish terms. The snobbery is equally distributed between left and right. Christopher Isherwood called her ‘quite a common little thing’. Richard Eyre said that ‘if it weren’t for the sharp English upper-class voice, you’d say she looks like a Maltese landlady.’ Cecil Beaton described her as vulgar and later as ‘a poor midgety brute’ who had ‘gone to pot … her complexion now a dirty negligee pink satin’. Only matched by Alan Clark’s diary entry: ‘fat, ugly, dwarflike, lecherous and revoltingly tastelessly behaved’ (from a master of deportment). The emphasis on her small stature was almost universal. It was the cruellest thrust, and one suspects a deliberate one, when her husband (himself no giant) made a TV documentary about midgets, which Margaret gamely described as ‘not my cup of tea at all. Bit too near home, I’m afraid.’ Yet they all went on angling and wangling. Her presence lured every star in Hollywood to the party Tynan threw for her. 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. Until the 1960s, it was the other way around. Accents were continually upgraded. “An honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club,” Shaw wrote in the same preface (a less well-known sentence, in which the Irish playwright displays the snobbery he was chastising the English for a paragraph or two before). But not many working-class people shared that view. It was good to speak proper: you got on that way. There are events in here that any beatles fan knows well, take for instance their first appearance on the ed sullivan show. In the beatles anthology docu-series we see the performance, accompanied by talking heads of the band members remembering the moment. Brown explodes it, reminding us that JFK was assassinated months prior, leading to a lingering unease in the US, which some say the beatles helped to heal. He takes you into the lives of other people on the show that night, a comedy duo who messed up due to the uninterested reaction of the audience who were only there for one thing, whose professional career would never recover leading them into obscurity. And then it takes you into the lives of the numerous people, of all different locations, ages and walks of life, that were deeply affected by the performance and whose lives were all subsequently changed. It's this keen eye for recontextualising and constantly following different viewpoints and narrative tributaries that makes the whole thing so hugely powerful, completely transforming the details you thought you knew and had taken for granted. 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.
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