Beauty, bad temper and scandal in a riveting look at Princess Margaret

The wisdom of the book, and the artistry, is in how Brown subtly expands his lens from Margaret's misbehaviour

The past, Julian Barnes once wrote, has a way of behaving like a piglet, greased up and let loose in a room. It makes a lot of noise. People make fools of themselves trying to capture it. Invariably, it slips away.

This is the very business of biography — “the most sheepish and constrained of the arts,” the English journalist and satirist Craig Brown writes in his new book, Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. However, his study of the princess, the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth — and one of the 20th century’s great malcontents — is gloriously truant. Brown ignores