Princess Margaret’s Life And Loves
That wonderful writer Darryl Pinckney reflects: ‘By the time she died in 2002, after a life of hairdressers, church services, luncheons, audiences, teas, dinners, suppers, dancing, fittings, house parties, receptions, openings, premieres, ship launches, variety shows, parades, point-to-points, Ascot stakes, weddings, funerals, hunts, beaches, planes, drinks, and cigarettes, she was twelfth in line to the throne, going on quietly in Kensington Palace, the aunt heap, where, toward the end, she burned garbage bag after garbage bag of letters she’d removed from Clarence House, still the residence of the Queen Mother. Princess Margaret had been a wife, was a mother and grandmother, but it was her inevitable slide down the ladder of succession and no more Commonwealth tours that most defined her life—or so Craig Brown concludes in “Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret.”‘
