Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret
Ratings2
Average rating2.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating2.5
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
A biography can sometimes be all from other peoples' points of view, if the subject of the book is not a part of the interviewees. This book does meet those criteria but the chosen glimpses have a gossiping quality that is rather mean-spirited and ego-based, and I'm not fond of this.
I didn't need to get too far into the book to get the over arching message of the book, that the majority of interviewees felt Princess Margaret was hard to interact with. No need to stick it out to the end.
