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Right in the centre of Sydney’s thriving culinary scene, we focus on using fresh ingredients & seasonal produce with traditional flavours and contemporary techniques. Brown’s subject is that most beloved of all British bands, The Beatles. He uses a similar style to Ma’am Darling to tell their near-unbelievable story, in which four young boys from Liverpool could first perfect and then reinvent an entire musical form, before separating and drifting apart before their youngest members were even 30. We discover that Wallis Simpson adored them, that Noel Coward loathed them, and that the Queen said, “Think what we would have missed if we had never heard The Beatles.” Brown is a perfect guide, and this is the equal to Ma’am Darling. Would I recommend to Jen (smart, discerning reader)? 5. I feel that this is the one book I know Jen would love. On learning of the affair, Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, private secretary to the new queen, told Townsend: ‘you must be either mad or bad.’ Within a month, he had persuaded Churchill to exile Townsend to Brussels as air attaché, without even giving him time to say goodbye. I once met Lascelles when I was at school, and was startled by his explosion of venom against the Duke of Windsor, whose private secretary he had been before the war. He was memorably unpleasant. The hope was that the separation would cool their love. But on his return two years later, Townsend said that ‘our feelings for one another had not changed.’ By now, Margaret was 25, and was free under the Royal Marriages Act to marry without the queen’s consent. It was time for the establishment to bring up the big guns. On 1 October 1955, Anthony Eden informed the princess that the cabinet had agreed that if she went ahead with the marriage, she would have to renounce her royal rights and her income from the Civil List. In deploying this threat, the government could scarcely be said to be responding to popular hostility to the match. Gallup found that 59 per cent approved of it and only 17 per cent disapproved. So was it the Church of England’s influence? Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, a famous thrasher in his days as headmaster of Repton, was interviewed on TV by Richard Dimbleby on 2 November, two days after the announcement that the marriage would not happen. Fisher maintained that the decision had been the princess’s alone and that ‘there was no pressure from Church or State.’ This was a barefaced lie. We have seen the blunt financial threat from Eden. True, on her meeting with Fisher on 27 October, the princess did indeed say that she had come not to seek his guidance but to tell him of her decision. But at an earlier dinner with him, on 19 October, he had earnestly counselled her to call it off. There was also an extraordinary leader in the Times on 26 October, which has all the portentous fingerprints of the editor, Sir William Haley. Her camp followers – never was that phrase more apt – scarcely waited till she had left the room before they started bitching about her, usually in snobbish terms. The snobbery is equally distributed between left and right. Christopher Isherwood called her ‘quite a common little thing’. Richard Eyre said that ‘if it weren’t for the sharp English upper-class voice, you’d say she looks like a Maltese landlady.’ Cecil Beaton described her as vulgar and later as ‘a poor midgety brute’ who had ‘gone to pot … her complexion now a dirty negligee pink satin’. Only matched by Alan Clark’s diary entry: ‘fat, ugly, dwarflike, lecherous and revoltingly tastelessly behaved’ (from a master of deportment). The emphasis on her small stature was almost universal. It was the cruellest thrust, and one suspects a deliberate one, when her husband (himself no giant) made a TV documentary about midgets, which Margaret gamely described as ‘not my cup of tea at all. Bit too near home, I’m afraid.’ Yet they all went on angling and wangling. Her presence lured every star in Hollywood to the party Tynan threw for her. At her funeral and memorial service, the camp followers were out in force, scurrying home to their diaries to confide afterwards how awful she had been.
Princess Margaret Had a Luxuriously Self-Indulgent Morning
His reading has been prodigious: not only the diaries of everyone from Chips Channon to AL Rowse, but dozens of gruesome royal biographies and memoirs, up to and including My Life With Princess Margaret by her former footman, the slithering David John Payne. Oh, how the sinister Payne loathes the arrival in Ma’am’s life of the slugabed snapper Armstrong-Jones – a character whom Brown introduces, incidentally, with a list of the contents of his Rotherhithe bachelor pad (golden cage containing three lovebirds; miniature brass catafalque; stand in the shape of a Nubian boy). British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial ‘gift’ from the railways to the rule of law was designed in Britain’s interests alone.Best when entertainingly recalling tidbits and Beatles anecdotes, especially the effect they had on individuals who later became famous musicians, and how politicians (some more successful than others) attempted to leverage their image to support their agendas Until the 1960s, it was the other way around. Accents were continually upgraded. “An honest and natural slum dialect is more tolerable than the attempt of a phonetically untaught person to imitate the vulgar dialect of the golf club,” Shaw wrote in the same preface (a less well-known sentence, in which the Irish playwright displays the snobbery he was chastising the English for a paragraph or two before). But not many working-class people shared that view. It was good to speak proper: you got on that way.
Ma’am Darling: : The hilarious, bestselling royal biography Ma’am Darling: : The hilarious, bestselling royal biography
Anyone who has ever enjoyed Craig Brown’s pitch-perfect satirical writing for Private Eye will know how incredibly gifted he is at imitating (and ridiculing) specific voices and characters, but his 2017 book Ma’am Darling did something altogether more challenging and successful. Brown produced an anti-biography of sorts about Princess Margaret, using everything from interviews to fantasy to produce a kaleidoscopic life of a complex character. It won the James Tait Prize and fans were itching for this follow-up. In the eighteenth century, India’s share of the world economy was as large as Europe’s. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation.Dame Hilary Mantel’s conclusion to her Wolf Hall saga, focusing on the downfall and execution of Henry VIII’s leading courtier, Thomas Cromwell, is surely the most highly anticipated book of 2020. It has been heralded by a popular BBC adaptation of the earlier books ( Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies), an RSC play, and endless column inches discussing anything from Tudor fashion to Mantel’s views on the Harry and Meghan saga. (Racism “is more deeply embedded in people’s consciousness than any of us are willing to admit,” she says. “I hesitate to call her a victim but ... there has been an element of racism in the invective against her.”) Hugely entertaining … brilliantly written, with a wonderful sardonic edge but also a thoughtful, at times even moving tone” - Spectator
Earl of Snowdon to publish new biography on mother Princess
I have loved previous books that I have read by Craig Brown, so, when I learnt he was writing a book about my favourite band of all time, it was a must-read. Over the years, I have read hundreds of books about The Beatles and so I always wonder whether another book will provide anything new. This follows the format of his book about Princess Margaret, and, in this entertaining volume, the author takes lots of moments in time, which reflect what the Beatles meant and how people reacted to them. At first nights, she seldom fails to tell the producer or director how much she loathed the show. To Robert Evans, producer of Love Story, at the Royal Command Performance of the film: ‘Tony saw Love Story in New York. Hated it.’ When Dennis Main Wilson says, ‘Ma’am, I have the honour to produce a little show called Till Death Us Do Part,’ she cuts down his faux modesty with: ‘Isn’t that that frightfully dreary thing in the East End?’ At the end of Carousel at the National Theatre, Richard Eyre escorts her to the door: ‘I’m glad you enjoyed the show.’‘I didn’t, I can’t bear the piece.’ Cawthorne details the biggest royal troubles to have hit the media, without much pomp, just in-depth summaries to inform and engage any reader, royal-followers or not.Brown is also as concerned with the innumerable people who missed out on fame than the few that achieved it; one of the most moving snapshots is a deep dive into the life of Jimmie Nichol, who is elsewhere a tiny footnote in the story of the band. He replaced Ringo as their drummer for only a week or two but the repercussions of that time would alter his entire life. It is one of the many many instances that manages to find incredible untrodden ground in one of the most chronicled artefacts of modern history. Some of you may remember an American sci-fi show from the '80s, called Quantum Leap. In it, a physicist gets caught in his own quantum time machine, willy-nilly jumping from one historical moment to the next, taking over a person's body for a short while. Reading this book will have you, dear reader, quantum leaping through Beatles history. When news of the budding romance between a beloved English prince and an American actress broke, it captured the world’s attention and sparked an international media frenzy. A lot of the information here is not new, some are people's reflections so are new to us. But if, rather than play the annoying "I knew all this stuff already" game, you just read and reflect from whatever your connections to them were/are, I think you'll enjoy this. Don't make this a "I'm a bigger fan than you" thing either, there is no single "biggest fan" so get over it. Just remember the joy and happiness you experienced when you were living the moments in your life that they and their music touched. If you want to play a game, play the what if game, what if they had... So many wonderful possibilities but the flip of the coin might have had them tarnishing their legacy. But the disappointment (for fans and music lovers) of an early break up, relatively early deaths, feuds that might not have had to be so enduring, what if...
Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown review - The Guardian
For the very first time,Finding Freedom goes beyond the headlines to reveal unknown details of Harry and Meghan’s life together, dispelling the many rumours and misconceptions that plague the couple on both sides of the pond. As members of the select group of reporters that cover the British Royal Family and their engagements, Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand have witnessed the young couple’s lives as few outsiders can. Each chapter provides an illuminating vignette which progressively adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It's a social history as much as a musical one. This kaleidoscopic biography of the Fab Four is even better than Ma'am Darling, which is saying something. Their story and influence is perfect for this type of exploration. A joy from start to finish. Brown has been our best parodist and satirist for several decades now. His distinguished mentors were William Donaldson and Auberon Waugh, and you can often catch an echo of their sly style in his prose. Here is a classic chapter opener: As this sweeping biography shows, Prince Charles is more complicated and compelling than we knew, until now.
I did have a few issues with this however; it did get a bit dense at times and I would find it difficult to read for too long a time. I also thought that there was no logic to the topics that were focused upon. I felt like there were big and small events that were covered in depth and then there would be other big events that were brushed over or just not mentioned at all. A biography teeming with the joyous, the ghastly and the clinically fascinating” - Hannah Bett, The Times The title captures pretty well what we have here - 150 short chapters, of moments in the Beatles' lives, in the lives of people around the Beatles, in the lives of the millions who loved their music. Some stories you will have heard before, although probably not as detailed, and if you're like me, most will be completely new to you. Beginning with his lonely childhood, Smith details his intellectual quests, his entrepreneurial pursuits, and his love affairs, from the tragedy of his marriage to Diana to his eventual reunion with Camilla, as well as his relationship with the next generation of royals, including Will, Kate, Harry, and his beloved grandchildren. One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time adopts the same "exploded biography" format of Ma'am Darling. As such it is part biography, part anthropology, part memoir, and mixes the humorous with the serious, and the elegiac with the speculative. It combines intriguing minutiae of their day to day lives with broader explorations of their effect on the world, their contemporaries, and future generations. We also discover much about the industry that has grown up around them, and which is every bit as fascinating as their own history.
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