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

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The funny and tragic, bestselling biography of The Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, perfect for fans of Netflix’s The Crown. Each chapter provides an illuminating vignette which progressively adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It's a social history as much as a musical one. This kaleidoscopic biography of the Fab Four is even better than Ma'am Darling, which is saying something. Their story and influence is perfect for this type of exploration. A joy from start to finish. Ma’am Darling is fascinating. Brown has done something amazing with Ma’am Darling: in my wilder moments, I wonder if he hasn’t reinvented the biographical form” - Observer

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time - Goodreads One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time - Goodreads

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. 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.Worst (and most off-putting) was the author’s snooty “above it all” attitude with a lot of the people he interviews (notable examples, his evisceration of Beatles tour experiences, his interview with a former Quarryman) 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. As this sweeping biography shows, Prince Charles is more complicated and compelling than we knew, until now. 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 Morrison

Ma’am Darling: The hilarious, bestselling royal biography

From the award-winning author of Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret comes a fascinating, hilarious, kaleidoscopic biography of the Fab Four. 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. 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. When news of the budding romance between a beloved English prince and an American actress broke, it captured the world’s attention and sparked an international media frenzy.The last "Glimpse" I'll share is a commonly known one, when The Beatles played their last public concert on the roof of their business entity Apple Corp. which was on Savile Row in London. This was a street of pricey bespoke tailor shops and other businesses, and soon irate phone calls were received by the police station because of the noise. So here is a personal recounting from a young police officer, sharing how none of the police wanted to do anything like arrest The Beatles, and how they went up to the roof. He couldn't believe it when he was suddenly standing near Ringo. Well, this young police officer became Princess Diana's personal protection officer in 1988. His name? Ken Wharfe. Who wants these days to sound posher than the family they were born into? One man at least: Jacob Rees-Mogg His reading has been prodigious: not only the diaries of everyone from Chips Channon to AL Rowse, but dozens of gruesome royal biographies and memoirs, up to and including My Life With Princess Margaret by her former footman, the slithering David John Payne. Oh, how the sinister Payne loathes the arrival in Ma’am’s life of the slugabed snapper Armstrong-Jones – a character whom Brown introduces, incidentally, with a list of the contents of his Rotherhithe bachelor pad (golden cage containing three lovebirds; miniature brass catafalque; stand in the shape of a Nubian boy). 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.