"Princess Margaret (especially in middle age) was so consistently and gloriously awful that she, like her brother-in-law Prince Philip, sometimes achieved a kind of perverse greatness. Nancy Mitford likened her to a "hedgehog covered in primroses," but this may be unfair to hedgehogs. The princess once said of her friend Gore Vidal, “The trouble with Gore is that he wants my sister’s job.” Dishy tell-all celebrity biographies are usually not my thing, but this one is both innovatively structured and written with real style and wit."
Publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication Date 2018-08-07
Section New Hardcover - Biography / European History
Format Hardcover
ISBN 9780374906047
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.
