She previously wrote about Colin Tennant, her monstrous, charismatic, visionary husband, the laird of Mustique, with such distance that he shone as a sort of literary creation, to be put safely on a shelf beside Hons and Rebels. Part of her success comes from the old-world solidity and decorousness she embodies: her utter lack of introspection or guff. And if you go down the audio-book route you can also enjoy her marvellously comforting, unflappable voice, and those vowels that ought to be listed by English Heritage: the ‘gawn’s and ‘orf’s and ‘goff’s that The Crown didn’t quite dare recreate, probably thinking no one would believe them. Afterwards, Chadwick Boseman, the American actor and star of Black Panther, who’d also been on the show, came up to me and said: ‘Gee whiz, lady!’ I thought, well, goodness, now I’ve arrived. By the time the show ended I was on an absolute high. I did, and the audience began to laugh in all the right places, so I let rip. He was very kind and advised me to launch straight into the story of the night in Paris just after our wedding when Colin took me to a live sex show at a brothel. Finding herself invited on to Graham Norton’s red sofa at the BBC, she asked her friend and Mustique mucker Rupert Everett to help her prep:

She likes the selling part, the promotion. Success, she says, ‘has come as a most marvellous surprise’. ‘I took my courage from Princess Margaret, who was a great believer that one didn’t dwell’ And now, coinciding with her 90th birthday, as well as (no flies on her) the new season of The Crown, Christmas etc, she publishes this volume of ‘life lessons’ – a catch-all, really, for any other top toff reflections from this most likeable of survivors. She hasn’t stopped since.įirst came an internationally best-selling memoir, Lady in Waiting, then two pacy novels.

It was his biography Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret that so enraged her that, in an effort to stick up for her friend, whom she served as a lady-in-waiting for 30 years, Lady Glenconner started writing in her mid-eighties. Craig Brown is responsible for the astonishing late flowering of Anne Glenconner.

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