The “downward trajectory” of the fabric of his trousers was, his pal couldn’t help but notice, being “sent askew by a bluff diagonal”. Beside her was Michael’s older brother, William, looking unremarkable save for one thing. Asked to sign the visitors’ book, Brown leafed nosily through it, at which point he discovered a photograph of Margaret, posing in the same hallway in which he stood, resplendent in a blue frock and fixed smile.

It was in the hallway of their grandest place that the incident occurred. At school, he tells us, he had a friend called Michael, the second son of a lord and a nice, diffident chap to whose family houses – among them a castle in Yorkshire and a stately home in Norfolk – he was often invited to stay. He dishes up a Margaret-related encounter of his own. It is, he writes, like playing Where’s Wally? or a super snobby form of I-spy: everyone seems to have met this prickly and parenthetical figure at least once, from Kenneth Williams to Evelyn Waugh, Ken Tynan to Elizabeth Taylor – a fact all the weirder when you know that the same people were often frequently desperate to avoid her.īut perhaps Brown’s obsession has another, more – how to put this? – Freudian source. Combining 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.W hat on earth brought on Craig Brown’s intense interest in the Queen’s late sister, Princess Margaret? At the start of his naughty new book about her, he attributes it to Margaret’s Zelig-style appearance – ubiquitous, if not exactly chameleon-like – in just about every other memoir, biography and diary written in the second half of the 20th century. It is Cinderella in reverse: hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled. 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. '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!' Princess Margaret aroused passion and indignation in equal measures.

For 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. A Guardian Book of the Year A Times Book of the Year A Sunday Times Book of the Year A Daily Mail Book of the Year She made John Lennon blush and Marlon Brando clam up.

Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown