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As it happens, Princess Margaret was extremely devout all her life (without her piety having much visible impact on her conduct).
Rogue Royals – Top 10 Books on the Biggest Royal Scandals - Wob
As if to compensate for these omissions, Brown gives us lots of wonderful incidental detail, listing the bizarre mixed bills at Royal Variety Performances and enumerating some of the 896 possessions sold off at Christie’s by her children David and Sarah in 2006. From the Greeks to Hillary Clinton, 115 rocket-fuelled pages on how power structures at every level exclude and silence women. By now, Margaret was 25, and was free under the Royal Marriages Act to marry without the queen’s consent. The version in Townsend’s memoir is that it was only after his divorce from Rosemary in December 1952 that their love had been allowed to blossom. A cooler, more serene take on the subject is to be found in Bluets by Maggie Nelson (Jonathan Cape), recently published in the UK for the first time.
All the harsher then that she should have been a victim of such strong-armed humbug by the combined forces of Church and State. 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.
Craig Brown | Books | The Guardian Craig Brown | Books | The Guardian
When Armstrong-Jones tried to introduce himself to the fearsome Betty Kenward, the pseudonymous author of ‘Jennifer’s Diary’ in Queen magazine, she snapped: ‘Don’t you dare address me, I don’t talk to my photographers. It was also the most interesting thing to happen to the royal family between the abdication and the death of Diana. Craig Brown's Ma'am Darlingand Priestdaddyby Patricia Lockwood are the books we've been reading this week. She was, however, famously royal, so when she reached into her bag, extracted a cigarette and pointed it towards Strand, he knew his (republican) duty.In an era when the death of Caroline Flack has led to many questioning whether the relationship between the press and those that they first build up, then destroy, is anything other than toxic, Jenner looks at 125 cases, ranging from the Bronze Age to the halcyon days of Hollywood, of those who achieved their own success and fame and often regretted it. And they are set against her knowledge of how “very lucky” she has been to “find happiness as well as tragedy”.
Princess Margaret Had a Luxuriously Self-Indulgent Morning
Princess Margaret with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor at the Royal Film Performance of The Taming Of The Shrew at the Odeon Theatre, Leicester Square, 1967.If the marriage went ahead, ‘the princess will be entering into a union which vast numbers of her sister’s people, all sincerely anxious for her lifelong happiness, cannot in conscience regard as a marriage.
The Guardian Best books of 2017 – part one | Hollie McNish | The Guardian
Brown tends to smile more on the world’s rogues and chancers – such as the criminal John “Biffo” Bindon, who might (or might not) have been the princess’s lover – while keeping his severity for those who are most up themselves. I chose it because the first story I read moved me to tears by the second page, the second story almost made me vomit, the poems made me up my game and the essays were a much needed education. One of the great pleasures and surprises of our digital reading age has been the resurgence of the essay.But Strong captures her mulish, dipsomaniac attitude to life and duty, observing, “HRH slugged through the whisky and sodas” during a “crashingly dull” dinner. Keith Waterhouse, at a reception, alarmed at watching the ash get longer and longer on the royal fag, began to reach for an ashtray; but she found a quicker solution by tapping the ash off into Waterhouse’s passing palm.
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