Yet, miraculously, the Queen has managed to avoid saying anything striking or memorable to anyone. must surely have met more people than anyone else who ever lived. While the result certainly shows Margaret in all her unreformed brattishness, it also has a certain sympathy for a woman who ended up becoming a caricature of herself, with few ‘friends’ whom she could really trust.

He doesn’t pull his punches, but he is not without compassion for Margaret’s fate. Brown has delved deep into a dizzying range of memoirs, diaries, autobiographies, hearsay, rumours and interviews to create a memorable picture of the Queen’s younger sister. Although standard, respectful royal biographies hold little interest for me – much better to read about people from a few hundred years ago, because the deference has worn off – this proved to be an engrossing read, bubbling over with bon mots and eye-opening stories. I suspect I’m not the only viewer of that surprisingly absorbing series who has sought out Craig Brown’s delicious, scurrilous, gossipy, genre-bending biography of Princess Margaret. What, you may reasonably ask, on this dying planet of ours at this moment of widespread argh and grr, would possess anyone to want to spend even a minute of their time reminding themselves of the past few years in British public life, from Brexit to the pandemic and beyond? Surely only a collection of Hyde’s livid, electrifying and viciously funny work for the Guardian.After finishing the Netflix series of The Witcher, we decided to move on to something more conventional and, since neither of us had yet seen it, plumped for The Crown. While you’re at it, pick up a copy of Marina Hyde’s equally excellent What Just Happened?!, a collection of newspaper columns that functions as a phantasmagoric running commentary on our whiplash lives and times. This Christmas, don’t buy your dyspeptic uncle a novelty corkscrew, get him Haywire instead.

All these are learned, punchy, and to the point.

Revel in the skewerings of puffed-up public figures (Richard Dawkins, Alan Yentob), but also make time for wise and witty considerations of British painters (Stanley Spencer), writers (Kingsley Amis) and even an American rock star (Bruce Springsteen). Come for the merciless takedowns of attention-seeking gargoyles of our times (Piers Morgan, Jacob Rees-Mogg), stay for the insightful pen-portraits of peculiar, and peculiarly English, comedy legends (Kenneth Williams, Peter Cook). Haywire is a handsomely jacketed collection of Brown’s satirical columns, essays, reviews and more from the past 15 years, for publications including the New Statesman, Vanity Fair and the New York Review of Books, as well as the Eye.

Ma am darling craig brown