Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret

by Craig Brown

Overview

“Rollicking, irresistible, un-put-downable . . . For anyone . . . who swooned to Netflix’s The Crown, this book will be manna from heaven.” —Hamish Bowles, Vogue

“Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret is a brilliant, eccentric treat.” —Anna Mundow, The Wall Street Journal

“I ripped through the book with the avidity of Margaret attacking her morning vodka and orange juice . . . The wisdom of the book, and the artistry, is in how Brown subtly expands his lens from Margaret’s misbehavior . . . to those who gawked at her, who huddled around her, pens poised over their diaries, hoping for the show she never denied them.” —Parul Sehgal, The New York Times

“Brown has done something astonishing: He makes the reader care, even sympathize, with perhaps the last subject worthy of such affection . . . His book is big fun, equal measures insightful and hysterical.” —Karen Heller, The Washington Post

A witty and profound portrait of the most talked-about English royal

She made John Lennon blush and Marlon Brando tongue-tied. She iced out Princess Diana and humiliated Elizabeth Taylor. Andy Warhol photographed her. Jack Nicholson offered her cocaine. Gore Vidal revered her. Francis Bacon heckled her. Peter Sellers was madly in love with her. For Pablo Picasso, she was the object of sexual fantasy.

Princess Margaret aroused passion and indignation in equal measures. To her friends, she was witty and regal. To her enemies, she was rude and demanding. In her 1950s heyday, she was seen as one of the most glamorous and desirable women in the world. By the time of her death in 2002, she had come to personify disappointment. One friend said he had never known an unhappier woman. The tale of Princess Margaret is Cinderella in reverse: hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled.

Such an enigmatic and divisive figure demands a reckoning that is far from the usual fare. Combining interviews, parodies, dreams, parallel lives, diaries, announcements, lists, catalogues, and essays, Craig Brown’s Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret is a kaleidoscopic experiment in biography and a witty meditation on fame and art, snobbery and deference, bohemia and high society.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374538392
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	05/21/2019
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	173,221
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Craig Brown is a prolific journalist and author. He has been writing his parodic diary in Private Eye since 1989. He is the only person ever to have won three different Press Awards—for best humorist, columnist, and critic—in the same year. He has been a columnist for The Guardian, The Times (London), The Spectator, and The Daily Telegraph, among others. He currently writes for The Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday. His New York Times bestseller, Hello Goodbye Hello was translated into ten languages.

Editorial Reviews

Brown ignores all the starchy obligations of biography and adopts a form of his own to trap the past and ensnare the reader—even this reader, so determinedly indifferent to the royals. I ripped through the book with the avidity of Margaret attacking her morning vodka and orange juice…[Brown] swoops at his subject from unexpected angles—it's a Cubist portrait of the lady…As a subject, the princess proves to be something she never was in life: obliging. Beautiful, bad-tempered, scandal-prone, she makes for unfailingly good copy, and heaps of it…The wisdom of the book, and the artistry, is in how Brown subtly expands his lens from Margaret's misbehavior…to those who gawked at her, who huddled around her, pens poised over their diaries, hoping for the show she never denied them. History isn't written by the victors, he reminds us, it's written by the writers, and this study becomes a scathing group portrait of a generation of carnivorous royal watchers…Without ever explicitly positioning Margaret for our pity, Brown reveals how we elevate in order to destroy. Who or what, in the final reckoning, is the true grotesque—the absurd, unhappy princess, those desperate to get close to her, or the system propping them all up?

The New York Times - Parul Sehgal

06/11/2018
Chatty, catty, and intelligent, Brown’s portrayal in vignettes of Britain’s Princess Margaret (1930–2002) draws from published memoirs, interviews, and diaries. The “disobedient, attention-seeking” Margaret, writes critic and satirist Brown (One on One), grew up suffering in comparison to her older sister, who became Queen Elizabeth II. As “the one who wouldn’t ever be first,” Margaret was born to fulfill menial duties such as “the patronage of the more obscure charity, the glad-handing of the smaller fry.” She captured the world’s sympathy with her first, doomed romance to Royal Air Force pilot Peter Townsend (he was divorced and the queen refused to grant Margaret permission to marry him). “The rest of us are allowed to forget a youthful passion, but the world defined Princess Margaret by hers,” writes Brown. Margaret was a magnet for people who were “mesmerized less by her image than by the cracks to be found in it.” She was invited to events because she could be counted on to misbehave deliciously: “The presence of the Princess would endow a party with grandeur; her departure would be the signal for mimicry to commence.” Brown is sympathetic to the plight of a woman who, as a friend said, was “one of the cleverest women... I have ever met, and she never really had an outlet for her intelligence.” Brown’s entertaining vignettes form a collage portrait of a rebellious anti-Cinderella. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

A Guardian Book of the Year

A Times Book of theYear

A Sunday Times Book of the Year

A Daily Mail Book of the Year

“Rollicking, irresistible, un-put-downable . . . For anyone . . . who swooned to Netflix’s The Crown, this book will be manna from heaven.” —Vogue

“An original, memorable and substantial achievement.” —Times Literary Supplement

“A biography teeming with the joyous, the ghastly and clinically fascinating.” —The Times (London)

“Hilarious and eye-opening.” —The Observer (London)

“Hugely entertaining . . . Brilliantly written, with a wonderful sardonic edge but also a thoughtful, moving tone.” —The Spectator

From the Publisher

Narrator Eleanor Bron confidently uses her British accent to charm and mildly hypnotize listeners with this disappointing loose biography of Queen’s Elizabeth’s younger sister, the late Princess Margaret. The royal herself was vivacious, artsy, and elegant—and often known to exhibit sudden changes in mood. This audiobook ultimately gives no clear understanding of or even shallow insight into her character in its 99 vignettes, roughly chronological in sequence, each representing a chapter. Nonetheless, Bron provides a skillful, witty, and well-paced performance of this vapid work, which attempts to answer the question of what one is to do when one realizes life apexed at the age of 6. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

MARCH 2019 - AudioFile

2018-06-18
Sensationalistic snippets from the life of a royal princess.In this biographical montage of Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon (1930-2002), Daily Mail columnist Brown (Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings, 2012, etc.) reflects on the true nature of her regal life and loves. The author's "appetite for royal kitsch" surely fueled the culling of the book's material, which ranges from both adulating and scathing biographies to the letters and diaries of, among others, Peter Sellers and Gore Vidal. Brown lays bare the facets of Margaret's notoriously sharp-tongued personality, often abrasive behavior, affinity for well-heeled bohemia, and rumored sexual affairs. The author spares little in his scrutiny as the references hopscotch from the ubiquitous mentions of Margaret's name in notable texts and palace announcements to the post-mortem sale pricing of her jewelry collection. In a moment of parody, one of Brown's specialties, he hilariously imagines Margaret's marriage to Pablo Picasso. Many particularly scandalous chapters feature essays, opinions, and interview snippets categorizing Margaret as either an aloof snob who "turned pickiness into an art form" or a smug brat whose self-superiority and "snappiness was instinctive and unstoppable, like a nervous twitch." Collectively, the narrative creates a brutally honest yet dramatically unflattering portrait of Margaret's regal sybaritic lifestyle, her legacy of boorish behavior, and the competitiveness and outspokenness that doomed her friendships and her stormy marriage to Lord Snowdon. While savory overall, the onslaught of dishy details bends beneath its own weight in the book's final third. Fusing facts with fancifulness, Brown's barbed, devilishly entertaining narrative exposes Margaret for the majesty she embodied and, to some, consistently tarnished, but the author barely contributes to explanations as to why she felt so "hurt by life" and behaved accordingly. Biographer Hugo Vickers opined that the difficult Queen Mother-Princess daughter relationship was the glaring culprit.An endlessly provocative and deliciously scandalous book for royal watchers.

Kirkus Reviews