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Manners and Mischief: An A–Z of Royal Tales and Surprising Wisdom from Princess Margaret's Lady in Waiting
Filled with sparkling anecdotes and tales of living life to the full, featuring previously unseen photographs from Lady Glenconner's personal collection.
Lady Anne Glenconner, Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Margaret and Maid of Honour at the Queen's Coronation, returns with a rich, sparkling memoir told through an A to Z of her life. From affairs of the heart and Basil's Bar to dinners with the King and the art of entertaining each chapter reveals a vivid moment of joy, mischief or resilience.
Whether offering tips on getting out of the bath with grace, or how to lose at cards with Princess Margaret, she shares wisdom and memory in equal measure. This book is a love letter to a disappearing world and a reminder that life, at any age, should be faced with laughter, a stiff upper lip, and the odd vodka tonic.
Lady Anne Glenconner, Lady-in-Waiting to Princess Margaret and Maid of Honour at the Queen's Coronation, returns with a rich, sparkling memoir told through an A to Z of her life. From affairs of the heart and Basil's Bar to dinners with the King and the art of entertaining each chapter reveals a vivid moment of joy, mischief or resilience.
Whether offering tips on getting out of the bath with grace, or how to lose at cards with Princess Margaret, she shares wisdom and memory in equal measure. This book is a love letter to a disappearing world and a reminder that life, at any age, should be faced with laughter, a stiff upper lip, and the odd vodka tonic.
- GenresNonfictionRoyalty
224 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 2026
About the author
Anne Glenconner
18 books199 followersAnne Veronica (Coke) Tennant, LVO, Baroness Glenconner is a daughter of Thomas W.E. Coke, MVO, GOC, 5th Earl of Leicester and Elizabeth Mary (Yorke) Tennant, Countess of Leicester.
Lady Glenconner served as a maid of honour at the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. She was Extra Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Elizabeth II's sister, Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon from 1971 until the Princess died in 2002.
In 2019, Lady Glenconner’s memoir was published by Hodder & Stoughton. Speaking on her reason for publishing the book, she said: "I was so fed up with people writing such horrible things about Princess Margaret."
Lady Glenconner served as a maid of honour at the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. She was Extra Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Elizabeth II's sister, Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon from 1971 until the Princess died in 2002.
In 2019, Lady Glenconner’s memoir was published by Hodder & Stoughton. Speaking on her reason for publishing the book, she said: "I was so fed up with people writing such horrible things about Princess Margaret."
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Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews
August 27, 2026
There are memoirs, there are society memoirs, and then there is Manners and Mischief, which is less a book than an exquisitely upholstered trapdoor through which one falls, shrieking with envy, into Lady Glenconner’s quite preposterously glamorous life.
I adored it. I resented it. I devoured it. At several points I had to put it down and walk around the room muttering, “Oh, for God’s sake, Anne,” because really, how much more fabulousness can one woman reasonably be expected to have squeezed into a single lifetime?
Lady Glenconner has known everyone. And by “everyone” I do not mean the sort of people who now appear at Soho Farmhouse wearing cashmere beanies and describing themselves as “creatives.” I mean everyone. Princess Margaret. The Queen. Courtiers. Aristocrats. Duchesses. Millionaires. Eccentrics. People with houses that have names. People whose families appear to have been quarrelling with one another since the reign of George III. People who say things like “We went out to Mustique” in much the same tone that the rest of us say, “I popped to Waitrose.”
It is absolutely maddening.
The great charm of Manners and Mischief is that Lady Glenconner recounts all this with the breezy matter-of-factness of someone telling you what happened at the garden centre. Royalty drifts through the pages without trumpets or fanfare. Princess Margaret appears not as some remote historical figure but as a friend—difficult, funny, imperious, vulnerable and magnificently grand. The effect on the reader is intoxicating, although in my case it also produced a severe attack of social inadequacy.
I began the book perfectly content with my life. By page fifty I was furious that I had never been a lady-in-waiting. By page one hundred I wanted a title, an island and several unsuitable friends with inherited fortunes. By the end I was looking around my sitting room with undisguised contempt.
Because this is the wicked pleasure of Lady Glenconner’s world: proximity. She was there. Not peering over the velvet rope. Not reading about it in Tatler. There.
And what a “there” it was.
The parties! The houses! The clothes! The behaviour! The casual royal encounters! The gloriously eccentric people behaving in ways that would now require a publicist, a crisis-management team and three carefully worded Instagram apologies by lunchtime.
One reads it thinking: Yes, yes, terribly interesting—but could we go back to Princess Margaret? What did she say next? What was everyone wearing? Who was drunk? Who was furious? Where did they have dinner? Was there a tiara?
Lady Glenconner is an irresistible guide because she possesses that increasingly rare quality: discretion without dullness. She understands that good manners do not mean pretending nothing scandalous ever happened. They mean knowing precisely how much of the scandal to tell.
And, darling, she tells just enough.
There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about her refusal to turn herself into the heroine of every anecdote. Modern memoirists tend to excavate their own emotions until one longs to hand them a small spade and ask them to bury them again. Lady Glenconner simply gets on with the story. Extraordinary things happen; extraordinary people behave appallingly; tragedy arrives; life continues; someone presumably changes for dinner.
Beneath all the delicious social detail, however, lies something much tougher. Her life has contained genuine sorrow and astonishing difficulty, and the book is moving precisely because she does not demand that we admire her resilience. She simply demonstrates it. The manners of the title are not merely knowing which fork to use. They are a philosophy: endure, behave, don't make everything about yourself, and—for heaven’s sake—try not to bore people.
Naturally, I failed completely at the “don't make everything about yourself” part, because throughout Manners and Mischief I was consumed by one overwhelming question:
Why wasn't I invited?
Admittedly, in several instances I had not yet been born. I regard this as a technicality.
There is a particular agony in reading about Mustique. I have now developed what I can only describe as retrospective Mustique jealousy. I resent people who were there in 1973. I resent people who knew Princess Margaret there. I resent anyone who has ever said, “Oh, Mustique was terribly different in those days.”
OF COURSE IT WAS, SUSAN.
Lady Glenconner's memoir evokes a vanished social world in which glamour was apparently effortless, eccentricity was permitted, privacy existed and the most interesting person at dinner was not necessarily the most famous one. It is impossible not to mourn it slightly—even if, like me, your chances of actually having belonged to it would probably have been somewhere between negligible and “asked politely to use the tradesmen’s entrance.”
And yet there is no bitterness in Lady Glenconner’s recollections. Mischief, certainly. Mischief everywhere. But also affection, loyalty and an enormous appetite for life.
That is why the book is such heaven.
You finish it feeling that Lady Glenconner has spent several hundred pages confiding in you over drinks, while you sit bolt upright trying to appear completely unsurprised by sentences beginning, “When Princess Margaret and I…”
Inside, of course, you are screaming.
Manners and Mischief is funny, touching, elegant, occasionally outrageous and almost indecently enjoyable. Lady Glenconner has lived the sort of life that makes everybody else’s memoir seem as though it ought to be called Various Meetings I Attended and a Rather Nice Weekend was had.
I adored it. I resented it. I devoured it. At several points I had to put it down and walk around the room muttering, “Oh, for God’s sake, Anne,” because really, how much more fabulousness can one woman reasonably be expected to have squeezed into a single lifetime?
Lady Glenconner has known everyone. And by “everyone” I do not mean the sort of people who now appear at Soho Farmhouse wearing cashmere beanies and describing themselves as “creatives.” I mean everyone. Princess Margaret. The Queen. Courtiers. Aristocrats. Duchesses. Millionaires. Eccentrics. People with houses that have names. People whose families appear to have been quarrelling with one another since the reign of George III. People who say things like “We went out to Mustique” in much the same tone that the rest of us say, “I popped to Waitrose.”
It is absolutely maddening.
The great charm of Manners and Mischief is that Lady Glenconner recounts all this with the breezy matter-of-factness of someone telling you what happened at the garden centre. Royalty drifts through the pages without trumpets or fanfare. Princess Margaret appears not as some remote historical figure but as a friend—difficult, funny, imperious, vulnerable and magnificently grand. The effect on the reader is intoxicating, although in my case it also produced a severe attack of social inadequacy.
I began the book perfectly content with my life. By page fifty I was furious that I had never been a lady-in-waiting. By page one hundred I wanted a title, an island and several unsuitable friends with inherited fortunes. By the end I was looking around my sitting room with undisguised contempt.
Because this is the wicked pleasure of Lady Glenconner’s world: proximity. She was there. Not peering over the velvet rope. Not reading about it in Tatler. There.
And what a “there” it was.
The parties! The houses! The clothes! The behaviour! The casual royal encounters! The gloriously eccentric people behaving in ways that would now require a publicist, a crisis-management team and three carefully worded Instagram apologies by lunchtime.
One reads it thinking: Yes, yes, terribly interesting—but could we go back to Princess Margaret? What did she say next? What was everyone wearing? Who was drunk? Who was furious? Where did they have dinner? Was there a tiara?
Lady Glenconner is an irresistible guide because she possesses that increasingly rare quality: discretion without dullness. She understands that good manners do not mean pretending nothing scandalous ever happened. They mean knowing precisely how much of the scandal to tell.
And, darling, she tells just enough.
There is something wonderfully old-fashioned about her refusal to turn herself into the heroine of every anecdote. Modern memoirists tend to excavate their own emotions until one longs to hand them a small spade and ask them to bury them again. Lady Glenconner simply gets on with the story. Extraordinary things happen; extraordinary people behave appallingly; tragedy arrives; life continues; someone presumably changes for dinner.
Beneath all the delicious social detail, however, lies something much tougher. Her life has contained genuine sorrow and astonishing difficulty, and the book is moving precisely because she does not demand that we admire her resilience. She simply demonstrates it. The manners of the title are not merely knowing which fork to use. They are a philosophy: endure, behave, don't make everything about yourself, and—for heaven’s sake—try not to bore people.
Naturally, I failed completely at the “don't make everything about yourself” part, because throughout Manners and Mischief I was consumed by one overwhelming question:
Why wasn't I invited?
Admittedly, in several instances I had not yet been born. I regard this as a technicality.
There is a particular agony in reading about Mustique. I have now developed what I can only describe as retrospective Mustique jealousy. I resent people who were there in 1973. I resent people who knew Princess Margaret there. I resent anyone who has ever said, “Oh, Mustique was terribly different in those days.”
OF COURSE IT WAS, SUSAN.
Lady Glenconner's memoir evokes a vanished social world in which glamour was apparently effortless, eccentricity was permitted, privacy existed and the most interesting person at dinner was not necessarily the most famous one. It is impossible not to mourn it slightly—even if, like me, your chances of actually having belonged to it would probably have been somewhere between negligible and “asked politely to use the tradesmen’s entrance.”
And yet there is no bitterness in Lady Glenconner’s recollections. Mischief, certainly. Mischief everywhere. But also affection, loyalty and an enormous appetite for life.
That is why the book is such heaven.
You finish it feeling that Lady Glenconner has spent several hundred pages confiding in you over drinks, while you sit bolt upright trying to appear completely unsurprised by sentences beginning, “When Princess Margaret and I…”
Inside, of course, you are screaming.
Manners and Mischief is funny, touching, elegant, occasionally outrageous and almost indecently enjoyable. Lady Glenconner has lived the sort of life that makes everybody else’s memoir seem as though it ought to be called Various Meetings I Attended and a Rather Nice Weekend was had.
January 1, 2026
This was a charming read if you like her narration. I’ve read several of her books and find her interesting and entertaining. I think it’s fun to hear Lady Ann’s musings and realize she is in her 90’s! The book is very short w brief chapters using the alphabet to cover tips from A-z! Quite charming!
December 2, 2025
Easy numerous read about an eventful life
January 3, 2026
This is one of her more fluffy books, I finished it in one day. But it gives enough of her fascinating life to be interesting. From fluffy "F, flowera, nothing says welcome more than flowers in the bathroom" to more profound: K for kindness, J for jealousy. And some entertaining tidbits about the royal family.
Glenconnor is a member of a very aristocratic family and had to deal with the idiosyncracies of the British aristocracy. She inherited nothing after her father died because she was a daughter, all went to a second cousin. She became lady in wating to a childhood friend, princess Margareth, which meant she had to call her m'am and pack her suitcases.
But she also had to deal with a long marriage in which she was abused, she had to deal the loss of two sons, the almost fatal accident of a third son, and having twin girls, something that was thought of as "common". And when her husband died, it turned out that he had left everyting to his servant.
She never complains, in her own words, she "got on with things" bearing a stiff upper lip
She takes everything in her stride with equanimity, the glamorous and the difficult. Plus, she is aware of her priviledge.
Well... most of the time. She writes that her husband and spent most of his inheritance and that almost nothing was left. Hm, I would not call 25 million almost nothing...
Glenconnor is a member of a very aristocratic family and had to deal with the idiosyncracies of the British aristocracy. She inherited nothing after her father died because she was a daughter, all went to a second cousin. She became lady in wating to a childhood friend, princess Margareth, which meant she had to call her m'am and pack her suitcases.
But she also had to deal with a long marriage in which she was abused, she had to deal the loss of two sons, the almost fatal accident of a third son, and having twin girls, something that was thought of as "common". And when her husband died, it turned out that he had left everyting to his servant.
She never complains, in her own words, she "got on with things" bearing a stiff upper lip
She takes everything in her stride with equanimity, the glamorous and the difficult. Plus, she is aware of her priviledge.
Well... most of the time. She writes that her husband and spent most of his inheritance and that almost nothing was left. Hm, I would not call 25 million almost nothing...
October 12, 2025
I’ve never read any of Anne Glenconner’s books before but I’ll certainly be changing that now! This was such a fun book, full of so many stories and lessons from a life that’s swung from the highest highs to the lowest lows, and presented in a way that makes you feel like you’re sitting with her in her beloved garden, vodka tonic in hand, having a fabulous gossipy chat. There were so many great anecdotes, from the late Queen’s collection of rubber ducks in crowns to inadvertently uncovering a gang smuggling drugs into Britain, and so many lines that made me laugh out loud: “Following a capsize at sea when I was eighty, I have retired from sailing” or “What I really love is big pants”.
For any fans of the Royal Family or the kind of lifestyles we associate with Downton Abbey, this is a brilliant read about a woman who has certainly lived life and it had me hooked from start to finish. Wonderful!
Thanks to Netgalley, the author and publisher for an advance copy in return for an honest review.
For any fans of the Royal Family or the kind of lifestyles we associate with Downton Abbey, this is a brilliant read about a woman who has certainly lived life and it had me hooked from start to finish. Wonderful!
Thanks to Netgalley, the author and publisher for an advance copy in return for an honest review.
January 20, 2026
I have read all of Anne, Lady Glenconner's books and loved them all. Manners and Mischief comprises snippets from her aristocratic life which I found very interesting. She is a born writer and embraces the reader from page 1. I found her to be a very nice down to earth lady with plenty of common sense and the rare ability to forgive. Although she did not lack money or connections, she is a remarkable woman who began writing at the age of 87. She has produced 5 books in the last 6 years every one of them excellent. I read the entire book in one day and would recommend it to anyone who would like a good read.
July 30, 2026
I like the way this book is written. Lady glenconner comments on various topics and what she thinks of them. Each chapter has a topic, for example “dinner parties”. “Driving” and then contains her thoughts or experiences on teh said topic. I’ve decided this is the style in which I will write my biography! Short chapters with amusing observations and a record of her thoughts on the various topics. What a fun book.
September 1, 2026
An easy read , not as satisfying as Lady in Waiting, but amusing and charming. It’s remarkable to read about the sort of people who have to sell a piece of jewellery to pay for a child’s wedding. Honestly!! Not the sort of problem I will ever have ;) But Lady Anne is that kind of wonderfully warm and sympathetic person with impeccable manners who you’d like to be your friend. I have a feeling she’s a brilliant friend.
October 30, 2025
This is a collection of Lady Glenconner's musings, thoughts and experiences. Whilst largely charming and an easy read, it has a little of of the air bygone days which varied in interest. I think this book may be of more interest to slightly older readers or those with an intense interest in nobility.
February 23, 2026
Always interesting
Lady Glenconner has led such an interesting and busy life. She tells lovely stories about members of the Royal family. Even though she has lived a very privileged life, she never boasts. I would love to meet her and have a chat, but I think I would need at least a month and not even skim the surface of her stories. Always an enjoyable read.
Lady Glenconner has led such an interesting and busy life. She tells lovely stories about members of the Royal family. Even though she has lived a very privileged life, she never boasts. I would love to meet her and have a chat, but I think I would need at least a month and not even skim the surface of her stories. Always an enjoyable read.
April 19, 2026
I love Lady Glenconner so anything she writes I'll probably find good. My only criticism I would say about this book is that's a pointless piece of writing, for, example H is for Hair and she talks about getting her hair blow dried EVERY day with Princess Margaret. Life of Riley eh? So yeah, I think a lot of people won't quite get it but I still think she's fab. Prefer her other stuff though.
August 25, 2026
interesting and Informative
I really enjoyed this book. It whistles through the short chapters arranged alphabetically. It gives a nosey peep into the lives of our royal family and friends, written through the eyes of Anne Glenconner. Although I read it really quickly, it can be picked up and put down at will. Well worth spending reading hours on.
I really enjoyed this book. It whistles through the short chapters arranged alphabetically. It gives a nosey peep into the lives of our royal family and friends, written through the eyes of Anne Glenconner. Although I read it really quickly, it can be picked up and put down at will. Well worth spending reading hours on.
December 27, 2025
A fun book of anecdotes and insights into a world that no longer really exists. I read it in one sitting on a day between Christmas and New Year - it's a book that feels like sitting and having a cup of tea and a chat with Lady Glenconner. Perfect reading for a holiday brain break.
May 29, 2026
An easy read with some wonderfully charming titbits from Anne’s long life, it feels like a fireside chat over a mug of tea.
The chapters are short so it’s perfect book for coffee breaks and commuting.
The chapters are short so it’s perfect book for coffee breaks and commuting.
November 6, 2026
Pretty thin, but worth the price of admission. Good advice about flowers and vases, though! Don't forget to place fresh flowers in the guest bathroom, and be sure to sterilize a vase between each use, got it?
December 26, 2025
Brilliant read
January 3, 2026
Much ado about nothing
January 16, 2026
what a wonderful life Lady Glenconner has led & even though it hasn't been without tragedy. she remains interested in life good for her.
February 7, 2026
I didn’t enjoy this at all. Loved Lady in Waiting, but I think there’s only so much you can do now
March 7, 2026
Lovely and quick.
Review of advance copy
A quick read with snippets of life from Lady Glenconner who has many stories to share.
May 25, 2026
A beautifully enchanting book.
Short, sweet and full of glorious anecdotes and advice.
Short, sweet and full of glorious anecdotes and advice.
July 18, 2026
A lovely book. Very accessible and compulsively readable. Lady Glenconner is a true gem.
August 11, 2026
Quite lovely as audio
August 29, 2026
So entertaining
I really enjoyed this entertaining book. There are many cool stories, that put a smile on my face. Highly recommended.
From a fan in New Zealand.
I really enjoyed this entertaining book. There are many cool stories, that put a smile on my face. Highly recommended.
From a fan in New Zealand.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 25 reviews