Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret

By Craig Brown

From the winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize, the funny and tragic, bestselling biography of The Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret. Perfect for fans of Netflix’s The Crown.

A GUARDIAN BOOK OF THE YEAR • A TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR • A DAILY MAIL BOOK OF THE YEAR

‘I honked so loudly the man sitting next to me dropped his sandwich’ Observer

She made John Lennon blush and Marlon Brando clam up. She cold-shouldered Princess Diana and humiliated Elizabeth Taylor. Jack Nicholson offered her cocaine and Pablo Picasso lusted over her. To her friends Princess Margaret was witty and regal, to her enemies, she was rude and demanding. Ma’am Darling looks at her from many angles, creating a kaleidoscopic biography, and a witty meditation on fame and art, snobbery and deference, bohemia and high society.

‘Jaw-dropping’ The Times

‘Hilarious’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Brilliant’ Evening Standard

‘A masterpiece’ Country Life

Format: Paperback
Release Date: 28 Jun 2018
Pages: 432
ISBN: 978-0-00-820363-4
Craig Brown has been writing the parodic celebrity diary for Private Eye since 1989. He has written for a wide variety of publications, including the Daily Mail, New York Review of Books, New Statesman, Guardian and Spectator. His books include the New York Times bestseller One on One;One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction; and Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, which won the James Tait Black Award and The South Bank Show Sky Arts Award and was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US. He lives by the sea in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, with his wife Frances Welch; they have two children and two grandchildren.

”'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

”'A biography teeming with the joyous, the ghastly and the clinically fascinating” - Hannah Bett, The Times

”'Consistently hilarious and eye-opening” - Tim Adams, Observer

”'Heaven” - India Knight, Sunday Times

”'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

”'Craig Brown has brilliantly drawn together the component parts of a complex woman” - The Oldie

”'A playful, impish approach…Brown gives us lots of wonderful incidental detail…The deftly amused writing constantly tugs the corners of your mouth upwards” - Evening Standard

‘A cross between biography and satire that perfectly displays Brown’s rare skills as journalist and parodist’, Mark Lawson, Guardian, Books of the Year -

”'Hugely entertaining … brilliantly written, with a wonderful sardonic edge but also a thoughtful, at times even moving tone” - Spectator

”'If you want a book that will have you punching your pillow in helpless laughter, this is it. Moreover, he has invented an entirely new genre, of which it is a masterpiece … The list of the Princess's 'rumoured' lovers - up to and wickedly including Dusty Springfield - sparked my decision to buy this book as a Christmas present for everybody I know, and for those I don't.” - Country Life

”'Hilarious” - Sunday Telegraph

”'Brilliant” - Evening Standard

”'Craig Brown achieves the impossible by finding a tone in which to write about monarchy. Not bitchy, not snide, not angry, but not fawning nor deferential either. Just funny.” - David Hare, Guardian