Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret

I have read dozens of biographies of British and Continental royal personages. This biography of Princess Margaret is certainly the most unusual royal biography I have read. I think it is also the most amusing and entertaining. Most royal biographies, especially authorized ones, are hagiographies. Examples of this genre are William Shawcross’s “The Queen Mother” (2009) and Pope-Hennessy’s “Queen Mary” (1959).Craig Brown in writing this biography of Princess Margaret has broken with tradition in two mains respects. The book is the most irreverent royal biography I have read. It is the very antithesis of a hagiography. He has also created a new and possibly unique biographical style. Instead of the usual cradle to grave narrative, the reader is presented with ninety-nine glimpses from Princess Margaret’s life. Most are glimpses of her at unimportant social events that tend to highlight her moody, capricious, inconsiderate and often haughty behavior.Although the book is highly readable and entertaining one must wonder whether it can really qualify as a biography at all. Although I understand the author’s boredom with conventional biographies, royal and otherwise, I think the presentation of this book deprives it of any historical significance. A reader unfamiliar with the story of Princess Margaret would be left with a very incomplete picture of her indeed. Where, for example, is Princess Margaret as a mother?The Princess had two children with Anthony Armstrong-Jones, later Lord Snowdon. They are Viscount Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto and she also had three grandchildren. Yet there are hardly any references to them in this book and there is no description of the relationship Princess Margaret had with them. The only reference to Viscount Linley is in connection with the auction of his mother’s large collection of jewelry and other possessions after her death in which he is portrayed as a rather cold-blooded individual who did not hesitate to try to sell at auction even her 1957 portrait by Annigoni and was forced to buy it back from the auction house only after pressure was brought to bear by his father and sister.We learn virtually nothing of Princess Margaret’s relationship with her sister, Queen Elizabeth II. Although Princess Margaret had a phone on her desk with a direct line to the Queen’s apartments at Buckingham Palace and although the two apparently chatted by phone almost every morning, few details of what was by all accounts a very loving relationship are portrayed.More details are provided about the relationship between Princess Margaret and her mother, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. They at one time both resided at Clarence House on different floors and communicated by letters delivered from one to the other by liveried footmen. The author describes some interactions between the pair that suggest that Princess Margaret’s treatment of her mother was often disrespectful and even cruel, but the Queen Mother seems to have accepted all the slights and insults from her daughter with the grace and dignity she always displayed.Towards the end of the book the author indulges in “what ifs.” He places emphasis on what if Princess Margaret had been the first-born child of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, the current Queen, had been the second child. He suggests quite correctly I believe that Princess Margaret could never have carried off the royal job with the immense dignity and devotion of Queen Elizabeth II. However, this does not take into consideration the fact that the Queen was raised with the idea that she might one day inherit the throne, particularly after King Edward VIII’s abdication, and Princess Margaret was left to fulfill a secondary role.A more important “what if” is I think would Princess Margaret have been a different person if her marriage to her first love Group Captain Peter Townsend had not been prevented by the British establishment? The answer to that question cannot possibly ever be known. Would she have grown bored with him or would she have settled into a comfortable and conventional royal life since the Group Captain had been a favorite of George VI and was well acquainted with royalty and royal protocol? My sense is that Princess Margaret was left embittered by being deprived of an opportunity for a happy married life and that all her undesirable characteristics that the author shows such delight in portraying were the result of that early bad experience.The author points out that perhaps Princess Margaret’s most prominent characteristic was her unshakeable sense of being fully royal. She delighted in her title “Her Royal Highness, the Princess Margaret” and would often rebuke even close friends who failed to treat her with due deference. At dinner parties and functions of various types she would often use as an icebreaker the fact that she was the only person in the realm who could claim to be both the daughter of a King and the sister of a Queen.The question that arises though is can her sense of being royal be regarded as a defect? Today even among the British people there seems to be a desire that members of the Royal family be just like them and have the common touch. This explains the enormous popularity of Prince Harry who likes to be just one of the boys and has entered a marriage that among old established royalty would be unthinkable. However, what is the purpose of Royalty if they are going to be just like everyone else?The author takes a malicious delight throughout this book in pointing to Princess Margaret’s often bad behavior. It is true that Princess Margaret liked the arts and bohemia and therefore would often socialize with a rather raffish crowd. Therefore, she wanted to both have her royal cake and eat it. The author also tends to poke fun at the Princess’s appearance drawing attention to the fact that some called her “The Royal Dwarf” because of her small stature. However, the illustrations provided, except those towards the later part of her life, show a truly beautiful woman superbly dressed and coiffed and with a wonderful smile. I saw Princess Margaret once when she came to open a Clinic at a hospital where I worked, and she was the very epitome of what one might consider a Royal personage.In conclusion, I found this book tremendously interesting and entertaining. However, reading it for me was a kind of guilty pleasure. I think the author has been somewhat unfair to Princess Margaret and the definitive biography of her remains to be written. She deserves more credit than she gets in this amusingly malicious book.

I loved this book. Absolutely adored it. But after looking at the range of reviews on Amazon, it's clear "Ninety Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret", didn't charm most of its readers. Oh well, you can't please everybody...Craig Brown's biography of Margaret is unlike any other bio I've read. Split into 99 chapters - some very short - Brown gives a fairly non-linear look at "PM" life. Most of the "glimpses" are straight prose but some are written from an imaginary basis. Those "fiction" are pretty apparent, but sometimes the reader can be confused as to point of view/identity of speaker. Brown is not gentle with the main character but tries to give a fairly well-rounded picture of the Princess. She comes off as arrogant, bossy, rude, but there are glimpses of a woman who had lived a very limited life, not always by her own choice.Margaret Windsor was a woman around whom life occurred. She wasn't allowed to marry the man she loved - Peter Townsend - but Townsend turned out to be a bit of cad. Would her marriage have lasted if she and Townsend had married? Her marriage to Antony Armstrong-Jones was a horrific mess which ended badly. Her choice of men and friends was often skewed by her position in society - "get close to me...but not too close."Craig Brown's "glimpses" puts together a good picture of Princess Margaret without resorting to a straight biography. I'd advise you to read all the Amazon reviews - the 5 stars through the 1 - before you buy this book.

Being the Queen's younger sister isn't all it's cracked up to be. Often Princess Margaret was elegant, vivacious, and entertaining in a way her dutiful older sister could never be, but at other times she could be boring, snobby, and insufferable. Craig Brown has produced an account which is as mercurial as the Princess herself: often fascinating and hilarious, but at other times stuffy and frankly, tedious.This is not a standard biography but a series of 99 short chapters or vignettes, arranged in roughly chronological order, designed to shed some daylight on the Princess' life. Some are obviously fiction, like the description of her marriage to Pablo Picasso or the 1977 Christmas speech from "Queen Margaret I." Others are drawn from more traditional biographies of the Princess or her family members, and still others are obviously based on gossip passed from person to person within the Princess' circle of friends and acquaintances. There's a lot of repetition: it grew wearisome to read through all the nasty jokes the Princess' husband Lord Snowdon used to play on her, and I really don't see the point of summarizing obituaries or of a detailed list of every single item sold off by the Princess' children after her death in 2002, or indeed of reprinting advertisements listing the amenities of the Princess' former vacation spot on Mustique. But perhaps that was Brown's point: that Princess Margaret, despite being an intelligent and often witty woman, led an empty and tedious life.

After reading Craig Brown's delightfully amusing but at the same by all accounts accurate biography of Princess Margaret, the best one can say of her is that she was perhaps not the most sympathetic of characters. Page after page contains instances of slights, put downs, rudeness and seemingly endless examples of bad behaviour. In one toe curling scene she achieved the almost impossible by making Elizabeth Taylor seem shy and understated.As explained in the book her case was not helped by her choice of friends from the world of Bohemia who after witnessing the latest faux pas at some party or social event could not get home quick enough to write this up in their diaries, with a view no doubt to later publication. When she died her stock with the public was not high and there were no crowd lined streets in Windsor for her funeral (actually there was no one on the streets) and as one newspaper delicately put it, there was a "trickle" of people to sign the book of condolence.This is not a formal scholarly biography but Brown has done his research and drawn on much material of those who actually knew here being friend, enemy or servant. Overall this is surprisingly a rather balanced work and the suspicion emerges that she never really had a chance for what exactly was her purpose as she slowly descended down the accession list. Would things have been different if she was the first born? By all accounts her children have turned out well and enjoyed stable marriages which is more than can be said of her sister's.If nothing else the book is well worth buying to read the truly creepy and sinister extracts from her Footman's, David John Payne's book My Life with Princess Margaret. It reads like a parody worthy of Brown himself. Overall as long as you are not a fawning royalist this is no doubt a recommended read.

Princess Margaret's life has best been described as "Cinderella in reverse". As a young woman she seemed to have everything: beauty, glamour, wit, a luxurious lifestyle ... only to end up reclusive and nearly forgotten by most of the public, alienating friends with her imperious, high-handed ways and her rudeness. I wasn't sure what to expect with this book, but as a new way of doing biographies I quite liked it. Instead of a straightforward re-telling of the subject's life, it was more a series of random snapshots. I think I would have preferred it if the we'd been given some chapter headers telling us what aspect of her life was being dealt with now, and the parody chapters really didn't work for me. They just weren't funny. BUT on the plus side, there was plenty of stuff here I hadn't heard before, and the author strikes a good balance, never going full-on Royal Biographer Sycophancy, nor nasty hatchet-job. I think he does get to the gist of her better than most biographies I've read about her. I kept hoping to feel more sympathy for her, but her selfishness usually put paid to that. There was one example where she deliberately kept a pregnant woman standing, which marks her out as a complete cow in my opinion. I sympathised with Sir Roy Strong, who said he'd finally finished with her in 1997, when he simply couldn't take any more of her. I understand that feeling all too well. Towards the end I started to get fed up with it, as it just seemed to become a series of bitchy dinner-party anecdotes, although the segment on her funeral was very poignant. She'd planned it for years beforehand, and then on the day itself it all felt impersonal, as though it could be anyone's funeral. There is one delicious bit where the author cites the Queen Mother's legendary "radiance" and "delightfulness". He writes it must be easy to be radiant and delightful all the time when you never have to get the bins in, or carry a 12-pack of loo roll round the supermarket! Priceless.

I bought this book after watching seasons one and two of The Crown, which made me curious for more detail about Princess Margaret's life. The problem with this book is summarised by "glimpse" 12, which recounts how Princess Margaret's chauffeur regularly helped her burn bin bags full of her letters. She covered her tracks and there isn't much source material to use to piece together what kind of person she really was. The author therefore relies on anecdotes by people who met or knew her. The majority of these accounts are based on a single photo of a Royal Variety performance line-up or a short anecdote or entry in someone's diary. Probably a third of them are much-of-a-muchness - Princess Margaret turned up, behaved badly/eccentrically and then left. Another third are a bit more interesting/revealing, and are largely accounts by former employees who have sold her out or extracts from other biographies. The remaining third are padding - the author devotes several "glimpses" to imaginary scenarios that didn't happen such as what if Margaret had married Peter Townsend, what if she had been born first and been queen etc. He tell us how her birth instigated the modern horoscope column over several pages when a paragraph would have done, because I don't feel it told me anything about her. He also wastes "glimpses" telling us about a dream he had of the Princess while writing the book, and another talking about words that were added to the dictionary the year she was born and how they might or might not epitomise her. He also lists the website description of Mustique and the inventory of her former holiday home's rooms. Plus a long list of the stuff that her son auctioned following her death. What a waste of space! It seems to be called "glimpses" because no one could legitimately claim that this was a portrait. There is virtually nothing about her as a parent - her children are barely mentioned. Everything is out of order, probably to hide any gaps in the timeline and the fact that a lot of it is either irrelevant or very similar. The book is well-written and certainly not obsequious or saccarine, and it has it's interesting and entertaining moments, and it's a different way to do biography. It is really not that informative about Princess Margaret though. So I guess it depends what you are looking for. I am really surprised it got onto so many Book of the Year lists though. I must learn to trust them less!

I loved Craig Brown’s previous book, “One on One,” and so, although a biography of Princess Margaret did not particularly appeal; having heard so many good things about this unusual biography, I decided to give it a try. Subtitled, “99 glimpses of Princess Margaret,” this book has 99 chapters – some short, some longer. Unlike most biographies, this skips across time, backtracks and even veers into fantasy, at times. For example, there is an inspired piece about Princess Margaret marrying Pablo Picasso, who was obsessed with her. In reality, she was disgusted when she heard about his feelings.Princess Margaret often shows disgust in this book – along with boredom, impatience, dislike, petulance, snobbery, waspishness and extreme inconsiderateness. Unlike her sister, the Queen, who tried (and presumably still does) to put people at ease, Princess Margaret was quite happy to make her unhappiness, and demands, known. A stickler for protocol – apparently even pointed out to her own children – she was all too aware that people could not eat until she did, leave until she left, sit unless she sat – and she delighted in taking full advantage of this. Arriving late, gobbling her food and then finishing so guests were left with half their dinner still on their plate, outstaying her welcome and being such a demanding, snappy and unpleasant guest that you wonder anyone wanted to gain an invite to dine with her. Of course, though, the lure of royalty led many to want to meet her and to relish being ‘presented’ to the royal presence.She did have friends, true friends, who seemed to care about her. However, mostly she was attracted by the bohemian set – who delighted in her acting up, and gleefully reported her bad behaviour in diaries, with an eye on publication. This book abounds with the famous and, at times, the infamous. We hear of Elizabeth Taylor, the Beatles, Peter Sellers, Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Kenneth Williams, Kenneth Tynan, Mick Jagger – and on and on and on. There are love affairs – the well known agreement that she would not marry the older, divorced, Captain Peter Townsend, for example. The marriage, and divorce, to the later Lord Snowdon and other love affairs. You do feel sorry for her, with Snowdon, in particular, seeming to delight in tormenting his wife. There is also her relationship with the other members of the royal family. She seems to have accepted most of her sister’s commands; such as who could, and could not, attend her birthday parties. However, she was less than impressed with both Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson and made her feelings very clear, when both may have imagined she would have been more sympathetic to their own marital failures than most.Overall, this is a fascinating portrait of a women, who despite her sheer awfulness, does demand some sympathy from the reader. In a difficult position – royal, but slipping down the order of succession to the throne with every marriage and birth – she was criticised for not undertaking more royal duties. Time made the public, and press, less forgiving. She expected the protocol and respect of her childhood and failed to receive it in a less deferential era. Those around her were wary, never quite relaxed. Meanwhile, with those around her – from a former governess, to a footman, to ‘friends,’ putting her words and life into print – she could be forgiven for not relaxing thoroughly either. I find that, having read this, I miss the verbally vicious, over-bearing Princess Margaret. She may have spent most of her life with a cigarette in one hand and whisky in the other (while hosts panicked over which brand she would like), but she had a lot of boredom to endure in a basically unfulfilled life. This is both a cruel portrait and yet also shows the drudgery of the royal life and the criticism that always seems to follow public figures. Her sense of duty seemed somewhat forced. Archly, she informed the producer of the Archers, who asked her whether she could sound as though she was enjoying herself more, when pretending to take place in an official engagement, “well, I wouldn’t be, would I?!” Perhaps that one line says more than anything about her life. A clever, inventive and excellent read.

I have a soft spot for Princess Margaret. I think it is because she just kept losing her spot, her place in the royal family shifted so naturally as the heir in succession, she never really had a place in line to the throne that was as important as she seemed t think she was. Therefore, she didn’t really find a way to fit in and was denied the things she so desperately wanted – which very simply seemed to be loved.In his book, Ma’am Darling, author Craig Brown presents you with various stories about Princess Margaret. Situations and encounters that she found herself in. Some of them are true and some are made up. You, as the reader, are left to figure out which is which.Princess Margaret is one of he most interesting royals and whilst these stories may seem wild and unbecoming of a princess I would really like to pretend that she did all of them. The world of the royal family would just be so much more fun if they were all true.Ma’am Darling – 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret by Craig Brown is available now.