Why Nobody Inside the Palace Could Stand Princess Margaret скачать в хорошем качестве

Why Nobody Inside the Palace Could Stand Princess Margaret

She arrived at official engagements in evening gloves and with a cigarette holder, looking as though she had stepped out of a Cecil Beaton photograph, and the public loved her for it. Journalists followed her, gossip columnists tracked her social life like military analysts following troop movements, and in the 1950s and early 1960s Princess Margaret was the most watched woman in Britain after her sister, and arguably the more fascinating one. But the people who cleaned her rooms saw something very different. Craig Brown’s 2017 biography Ma’am Darling, widely regarded as one of the most detailed portraits of Margaret’s private life, builds its case not through melodrama but through accumulation, and what accumulates is the image of a woman who treated glamour as performance and hierarchy as a weapon, aimed most often at those least able to resist. Born on 21 August 1930 at Glamis Castle, four years after her sister Elizabeth, Margaret began life as the second daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York, fourth in line to a throne that was never supposed to matter much to her. Then Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, and overnight her entire world changed: she moved to second in line, adults around her curtsied when she entered a room, and her identity became shaped by the strange condition of being almost, but never quite, the most important person present. She would spend the next sixty-six years trying to live inside that position, and not always with grace. The constitutional reality was mercilessly simple. Her sister was queen. Elizabeth had a role, the most visible role in the nation. Margaret had a title, a household, a Civil List allowance, and no clearly defined purpose that anyone could convincingly explain. Ingrid Seward, in My Mother and I, describes Margaret as feeling that the Queen was so good and perfect while she herself was very much the opposite, and Andrew Morton, in Elizabeth & Margaret, writes even more bluntly that Margaret’s frustration revealed a resentment and indifference that often came across as almost ill-mannered. That frustration needed somewhere to go, and it went downward.