Ready For Absolutely Nothing: ‘If you like Lady in Waiting by Anne Glenconner, you’ll like this’ The Times

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READY FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING is for fans of The Crown, royal followers, readers of LADY IN WAITING, What Not To Wear fans and anyone who likes a gossipy memoir with bold faced names and a drop dead sense of humor.

Ready For Absolutely Nothing by Susannah Constantine Ready For Absolutely Nothing by Susannah Constantine

Obviously the Princess of Wales dressed fashionably, she had an amazing figure, and she could have carried anything,” she says.Many of these stories are hilarious and snarky, some are painful, but all of them are honest, gossipy, and show that, in her words, she was “brought up to be ready for absolutely nothing. Personally could've done without the toilet stories but maybe that's my lower class coming out, ha ha. Born into a Yorkshire family of Landed Gentry in 1962, the style guru bluntly admits she was “so unworldly” as a youth – so much so, that she didn’t step foot into a supermarket until the ripe old age of 23. She lives in chaos on the edge of a wood in Sussex and works full time as a housewife, PA and taxi driver to her husband and three (sort of) grown up children.

Ready for Absolutely Nothing by Susannah Constantine review

The other involves Princess Margaret, a cubicle at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich and a purloined cake slice. I found the middle and latter part most enjoyable as she grew into her own and made a name for herself. Hers is a life filled to the brim with 70s glitz, 80s glamour and above all else an enlightening 50 years of f**k-ups, crisis and chaos. She first met him in the early 1980s, at the Queen Mother’s home, Royal Lodge, in Windsor, where he performed at the piano after dinner in a ringmaster’s tailcoat, balloon trousers, bejewelled spectacles and a cap accessorised with a sapphire brooch the size of a baked potato. And Constantine mixes uproarious black humour, often scatological in nature, with poignancy when it comes to the way she was written off early in life, only to confound her detractors with her subsequent success.This is a s a charmer of a book, written by someone who has had a bit of a charmed life - although leavened with those unhappy events to which we are all heir. In previous interviews, Susannah has blamed her breakup with Linley on the perils of being young and naive. There are well-judged observations on colonialism, largely illustrated through the character of the British émigré and farmer Charles Osgood, and Mason’s twist-laden narrative enthrals throughout.