MUSTREADS

Out now in paperback

(4th Estate £9.99) VANESSA KIRBY’S outstanding performance as Princess Margaret in the Netflix series The Crown depicted a complex, difficult figure who never found happiness or a role in life.

All members of the Royal Family are essentially unknowable behind their public image, so the problem facing Craig Brown as Margaret’s biographer was how to approach the inner life of ‘Priceless Margarine’, as John Lennon irreverently called her.

Brown’s solution, a world away from the scandalmongering or reverential tone of most royal biographies, is to construct a portrait of his subject in 99 chapters. Sharply satirical but not wholly unsympathetic, these are glimpses of Princess Margaret as we have rarely encountered her before.

Brown’s Princess is blisteringly rude, often bored, her hopes of love blighted, her lifestyle increasingly tawdry.

But if she was a tragic figure, she was also, the royal biographer Hugo Vickers claims, ‘nicer than she thought she was’.