"One of the stranger and more bookish rumours about the princess..."

"... is 'that Princess Margaret, having read Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, craved to see Nether Stowey. Accordingly she instructed her pilot on the way back from an official chore to circle several times around the Somerset cottage.'... Did the princess actually get through 402 pages of Holmes and then order a pilot of the royal flight to buzz Coleridge’s cottage? It sounds more than improbable, but the percentage of truth, if any, in the story would be a question for the traditional foot-slogging biographer. Instead, Brown gives us a chortling 11-page riff, describing this unverified event in 31 styles."

Writes Julian Barnes in a review of the book that in the U.S. is titled "Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret."

I'm reading that book and just got through the chapter with 31 retellings of the plane circling over Nether Stowey. Each version has a heading — "Journalistic," "Comic," "Statistical," "Discreet," "Confrontational," "Oleaginous," "Limerick," "Psychedelic," "Spoonerism," "Tragic." I love it. You certainly don't need to care in the slightest about Princess Margaret to enjoy this book. In fact, it will help if you don't. I know I don't.

Here's a passage I highlighted:

The Princess liked to one-up. I have heard from a variety of people that she would engineer the conversation around to the subject of children’s first words, asking each of her fellow guests what their own child’s first words had been. Having listened to responses like ‘Mama’ and ‘doggy’, she would say, ‘My boy’s first word was “chandelier”.’

The author is Craig Brown, I should mention.