Things like She’s Leaving Home, Eleanor Rigby and Here, There and Everywhere are so beautiful. He not only had this extraordinary genius for melody but for lyrics too. Paul was the one I always wanted to be and since doing the book, he remains my favourite. I can’t claim a lifelong friendship but he was very pleasant. I briefly met Paul at a gig in 1973 and asked him to sign the only thing I had on me, which happened to be a Roxy Music album. I also remember singing Yellow Submarine at boy scout camp. I was 10 in 1967, so came in at the Sgt Pepper period. The book is 600 pages but could’ve been 10 times the length.ĭo you remember when you first heard the Beatles? There’s the sociological backdrop, the curious phenomenon of fandom, the array of interesting weirdos in their orbit… It’s endlessly fascinating. Once they became successful, of course, it didn’t make them happier.
It’s a complete contrast to Princess Margaret’s, which is a sort of stationary life. Brown has managed to ingest huge numbers of royal books and documents without losing either his judgment or his sanity.Very, because the Beatles story has got everything. ‘Brown has been our best parodist and satirist for decades now … Ma’am Darling is, as you would expect, very funny also, full of quirky facts and genial footnotes. It is Cinderella in reverse: hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled.Ĭombining 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. 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. Princess Margaret aroused passion and indignation in equal measures. “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!” Peter Sellers was in love with her.įor 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.Īndy Warhol photographed her. She made John Lennon blush and Marlon Brando clam up. ‘I honked so loudly the man sitting next to me dropped his sandwich’ Observer The funny and tragic, bestselling biography of The Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, perfect for fans of Netflix’s The Crown.
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