Ma'am Darling

'Ma'am Darling is fascinating. Brown has done something amazing with Ma'am Darling: in my wilder moments, I wonder if he hasn't reinvented the biographical form' Observer 'A biography teeming with the joyous, the ghastly and the clinically fascinating' Hannah Bett, The Times 'Consistently hilarious and eye-opening' Tim Adams, Observer 'Heaven' India Knight, Sunday Times 'The only royal biography of the year worth handing the Queen's head over for, Ma'am Darling is a modern and unconventional portrait of an old-fashioned princess as distilled and pickled through the genius of Craig Brown' Helen Davies, Sunday Times 'Craig Brown has brilliantly drawn together the component parts of a complex woman' The Oldie 'A playful, impish approach...Brown gives us lots of wonderful incidental detail...The deftly amused writing constantly tugs the corners of your mouth upwards' Evening Standard 'A cross between biography and satire that perfectly displays Brown's rare skills as journalist and parodist', Mark Lawson, Guardian, Books of the Year 'Hugely entertaining ... brilliantly written, with a wonderful sardonic edge but also a thoughtful, at times even moving tone' Spectator 'If you want a book that will have you punching your pillow in helpless laughter, this is it. Moreover, he has invented an entirely new genre, of which it is a masterpiece ... The list of the Princess's 'rumoured' lovers - up to and wickedly including Dusty Springfield - sparked my decision to buy this book as a Christmas present for everybody I know, and for those I don't.' Country Life 'Hilarious' Sunday Telegraph 'Brilliant' Evening Standard 'Craig Brown achieves the impossible by finding a tone in which to write about monarchy. Not bitchy, not snide, not angry, but not fawning nor deferential either. Just funny.' David Hare, Guardian

Craig Brown's last book, Ma'am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret won both the James Tait Black Prize for Biography and the South Bank Sky Arts Award for Literature. His previous book, One on One, was long-listed for the Samuel Johnson prize for Non-Fiction. He has been writing the parodic celebrity diary for Private Eye magazine for over thirty years, and is currently a columnist for the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday. Over the years, he has written for a wide range of newspapers and magazines, including Vanity Fair, the Sunday Times, the New Statesman, the Spectator, the Guardian and the New York Review of Books. He lives in Aldeburgh, Suffolk with his wife Frances Welch; they have two children.