brilliantly written, with a wonderful sardonic edge but also a thoughtful, at times even moving tone’ Spectator ‘A cross between biography and satire that perfectly displays Brown’s rare skills as journalist and parodist’, Mark Lawson, Guardian, Books of the Year The deftly amused writing constantly tugs the corners of your mouth upwards’ Evening Standard ‘A playful, impish approach.Brown gives us lots of wonderful incidental detail. ‘ Craig Brown has brilliantly drawn together the component parts of a complex woman’ The Oldie ‘ The only royal biography of the year worth handing the Queen’s head over for, Ma’am Darling is a modern and unconventional portrait of an old-fashioned princess as distilled and pickled through the genius of Craig Brown’ Helen Davies, Sunday Times ‘ Consistently hilarious and eye-opening’ Tim Adams, Observer ‘A biography teeming with the joyous, the ghastly and the clinically fascinating’ Hannah Bett, The Times Brown has done something amazing with Ma’am Darling: in my wilder moments, I wonder if he hasn’t reinvented the biographical form’ Observer Brown has managed to ingest huge numbers of royal books and documents without losing either his judgment or his sanity.‘ Ma’am Darling is fascinating. It is Cinderella in reverse: hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled.Ĭombining 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.īrown 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. The tale of Princess Margaret is pantomime as tragedy, and tragedy as pantomime. One friend said he had never known an unhappier woman. By the time of her death, she had come to personify disappointment. In her 1950’s heyday, she was seen as one of the most glamorous and desirable women in the world.

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

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! Peter Sellers was in love with her.įor Pablo Picasso, she was the object of sexual fantasy. John Fowles hoped to keep her as his sex-slave. She cold-shouldered Princess Diana and humiliated Elizabeth Taylor.Īndy Warhol photographed her. She made John Lennon blush and Marlon Brando clam up. ‘I honked so loudly the man sitting next to me dropped his sandwich’ Observer WINNER OF THE SOUTH BANK SKY ARTS LITERATURE AWARD 2018

Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown