The eldest child of the fifth Earl of Leicester, Glenconner was maid of honour at the Queen’s coronation and lady-in-waiting to her childhood friend Princess Margaret. Is her memoir a horror show or a delightful entertainment? A manual for how to live, or how not to live? In truth, I’m not sure even she would know the answer to these questions. Nevertheless, I have to admit to being somewhat unprepared for Lady in Waiting, in which Anne Glenconner muses on her stiff upper lip and how it saw her through a marriage lasting 54 years to a man whose idea of a honeymoon treat was to take her – a girl who had been a virgin only hours before – to a fleapit of a hotel to watch two strangers having sex (“That’s very kind, but no thank you,” she said when invited to join in). B eing very common, I have something of a mania for aristo-lit: a passion for stories about big houses and the wanton eccentrics who inhabit them that began in childhood with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, continued into my teenage years with all things Mitford, and now finds ongoing sustenance mostly in diaries ( Chips Channon, I salute you, and all who sailed in you).
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