Anne Glenconner: ‘I took my courage from Princess Margaret’  

Craig Brown is responsible for the astonishing late flowering of Anne Glenconner. 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. She hasn’t stopped since.

First came an internationally best-selling memoir, Lady in Waiting, then two pacy novels. 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.

Success, she says, ‘has come as a most marvellous surprise’. She likes the selling part, the promotion. 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:

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. I did, and the audience began to laugh in all the right places, so I let rip. By the time the show ended I was on an absolute high. 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.

It’s rather like having lunch with her. Charm itself. 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.