For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions. Princess Margaret meets Frankie Howerd and Petula Clark at the London Palladium in November 1968. Photograph: Gamma-Keystone via Getty Images

Ma’am Darling: The hilarious, bestselling royal biography

Anyone who has ever enjoyed Craig Brown’s pitch-perfect satirical writing for Private Eye will know how incredibly gifted he is at imitating (and ridiculing) specific voices and characters, but his 2017 book Ma’am Darling did something altogether more challenging and successful. Brown produced an anti-biography of sorts about Princess Margaret, using everything from interviews to fantasy to produce a kaleidoscopic life of a complex character. It won the James Tait Prize and fans were itching for this follow-up. As Craig Brown points out there have already been many excellent books about the Beatles - so what's the point of another one?Wallis lived by her wit and her wits, while both her apparent and alleged moral transgressions added to her aura and dazzle. Accused of Fascist sympathies, having Nazi lovers and learning bizarre sexual techniques in China, she was the subject of widespread gossip and fascination that has only increased with the years. A shy man married a jolly woman. Jacob was the fourth of five children. He had some of his father’s accent but little of his shyness. His persona probably combines his mother’s sense of fun with his father’s self-importance, but to a large extent he’s self-invented. The theatrical drawl and the good suits make him a retro figure who seems to come from an older England of accents and classes, layered like geological strata, everyone knowing their place. His supporters, who know they can never sound as fine as he does, are drawn like moths to a most superior lamp. Brown has been our best parodist and satirist for several decades now. His distinguished mentors were William Donaldson and Auberon Waugh, and you can often catch an echo of their sly style in his prose. Here is a classic chapter opener: I was already thinking of reading a Beatles history when I came across 150 Glimpses, but which one to choose? The choice on offer is overwhelming. So I started on this book with some trepidation. It has taken me six months to read it (I do read several books at the same time, but even for me this is long), and I've loved every second of it. Whenever I felt a bit down, or one of the other books I was reading was getting too depressing, I would read a couple of chapters from 150 Glimpses, and without fail, it would cheer me up to no end.

Earl of Snowdon to publish new biography on mother Princess

Each chapter provides an illuminating vignette which progressively adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It's a social history as much as a musical one. This kaleidoscopic biography of the Fab Four is even better than Ma'am Darling, which is saying something. Their story and influence is perfect for this type of exploration. A joy from start to finish. Brown takes the fantasy a stage further by imagining how married life would have worked out for Pablo and Margaret. This is one of a series of counterfactual episodes spattered through the book: what if she had married Peter Townsend after all, what if she had married Jeremy Thorpe, another improbable contender for her hand, what if she had become queen instead of her sister? These capriccios melt beautifully into the text, because we are immersed in a land of dreams. Being a communist or a homosexual is no barrier here to imagining yourself walking up the aisle of Westminster Abbey with the royal trumpeters at full blast. Spring was once a quiet time for new books as publishers preferred to focus on the lucrative Christmas market, but that has now changed. Today, many publishers are releasing some of their most interesting, dynamic titles in spring. Here are some of the most eagerly awaited books of 2020, which may inform the nation’s cultural debate for years to come.

I recommend this to any Beatles fan, even the ones who can't resist pretending they know everything about them. If you sometimes grow tired of the narrative (I begin getting sad right around the time of Revolver when I read books that cover their history chronologically) and just want to remember the good times and memories, by all means grab this book. Drawing on extensive access to the Royal Family’s inner circle, Sally Bedell Smith delivers unprecedented insights into Prince Charles, a man who possesses a fiercely independent spirit, and yet has spent his life in waiting for the ultimate role. Having thoroughly enjoyed Craig Brown's wonderful Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, I was keen to read his next offering One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time (2020).

One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time - Goodreads One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time - Goodreads

I wouldn't call myself a massive fan of The Beatles, even though I've always enjoyed their music. I probably prefer reading about them than listening to them, being as culturally significant as they are. And this book, which won the 2020 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction, is the best thing I've read about them in some time. One of the traditional problems for the satirist is the transition from short-form to long-form. Brown solved this brilliantly in his previous book, One on One, a 101-chapter daisy chain of improbable but true meetings around the world and across the 20th century, with its end returning to its beginning. In Ma’am Darling he adopts a 99-chapter approach, with each section characterised as a “glimpse”. This allows him the flexibility to drop in a chapter of merely a few lines, and to go off at short or long tangents as the whim takes him – to be himself as much as possible. But quasi-biography, such as he has chosen to write, remains, alas, still a form of biography. There are lives to be described, and motives to be explored, and characters to be moved through time. As early as chapter 11, Brown is chafing at these normal responsibilities of a literary form he considers in the main to be “sheepish and constrained”. Thus, he relates how different people would describe the same princessy event, and yet each of them would describe it somewhat differently, leaving him in a quandary as to which version he should or could believe. To which the world’s biographers would riposte: tell us about it! This is merely base camp for them. One Two Three Four: The Beatles in Time adopts the same "exploded biography" format of Ma'am Darling. As such it is part biography, part anthropology, part memoir, and mixes the humorous with the serious, and the elegiac with the speculative. It combines intriguing minutiae of their day to day lives with broader explorations of their effect on the world, their contemporaries, and future generations. We also discover much about the industry that has grown up around them, and which is every bit as fascinating as their own history. Did it keep my interest? 4. 150 chapters, which are little beautiful Beatle blurbs. Twenty engaging hours of stories Beginning with his lonely childhood, Smith details his intellectual quests, his entrepreneurial pursuits, and his love affairs, from the tragedy of his marriage to Diana to his eventual reunion with Camilla, as well as his relationship with the next generation of royals, including Will, Kate, Harry, and his beloved grandchildren.She had been a wilful and mischievous child, unlike her dutiful elder sister. In that notorious book The Little Princesses, their nanny Marion Crawford, ‘Crawfie’, who looked after them for 15 years, described how she would mimic Lilibet’s methodical preparations for going to bed. Crawfie was never forgiven for the book. There was no royal wreath at her funeral. Margaret said simply: ‘she sneaked.’ In the eighteenth century, India’s share of the world economy was as large as Europe’s. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. As this sweeping biography shows, Prince Charles is more complicated and compelling than we knew, until now. Dame Hilary Mantel’s conclusion to her Wolf Hall saga, focusing on the downfall and execution of Henry VIII’s leading courtier, Thomas Cromwell, is surely the most highly anticipated book of 2020. It has been heralded by a popular BBC adaptation of the earlier books ( Wolf Hall and Bring Up The Bodies), an RSC play, and endless column inches discussing anything from Tudor fashion to Mantel’s views on the Harry and Meghan saga. (Racism “is more deeply embedded in people’s consciousness than any of us are willing to admit,” she says. “I hesitate to call her a victim but ... there has been an element of racism in the invective against her.”) Anglophobia certainly exists in Scotland, and the “slightly posh-sounding English” that Dunlop says she speaks probably does make her inimical to the more bigoted nationalist. But in England too that voice has lost friends. Who wants these days to sound posher than the family they were born into?