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The Diana Chronicles Paperback – May 20, 2008
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"The best book on Diana." —The New Yorker
Was she “the people’s princess,” who electrified the world with her beauty and humanitarian missions? Or was she manipulative and media-savvy and nearly brought down the monarchy?
Tina Brown, former Editor-in-Chief of Tatler, England’s glossiest gossip magazine; Vanity Fair; and The New Yorker gives us the answers. Tina knew Diana personally and has far-reaching insight into the royals and the Queen herself.
In The Diana Chronicles, you will meet a formidable female cast and understand as never before the society that shaped them: Diana's sexually charged mother, her scheming grandmother, the stepmother she hated but finally came to terms with, and bad-girl Fergie, her sister-in-law, who concealed wounds of her own.
Most formidable of them all was her mother-in-law, the Queen, whose admiration Diana sought till the day she died. Add Camilla Parker-Bowles, the ultimate "other woman" into this combustible mix, and it's no wonder that Diana broke out of her royal cage into celebrity culture, where she found her own power and used it to devastating effect.
- Print length561 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- Publication dateMay 20, 2008
- Dimensions5.18 x 1.24 x 7.98 inches
- ISBN-109780767923095
- ISBN-13978-0767923095
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Tina Brown knows this world much better than many who inhabit it." —The New York Times
"The book's greatest attraction ... is its sheer wealth of detail, by turns salacious, vinegary, depressing, and hilarious...a psychodrama, a morality play, a pageant of recklessness and revenge, of passion and pity, of loneliness and looniness." —The Wall Street Journal
"Peels many layers of ... mystery away and even makes the old horror stories of [Diana's] life seem fresh ... Brown gives them new vigor, with insights based on her own exhaustive research and a wickedly canny, celebrity-trained eye for detail." —Boston Globe
"The Diana Chronicles ... has enough of Diana's hairpin personality turns, emotional drops, and gleeful summits to be a Disneyland thrill ride ... Brown reminds us of her instantly intimate, magical presence." —Los Angeles Times
“Amazingly detailed ... Brown's jam-packed, juicy roll in the high cotton is ... a walloping good read.” —Washington Post
“[An] insanely readable and improbably profound new biography.” —Chicago Tribune
"Intensely well researched and an unputdownable read." —Academy Award-winning actress Helen Mirren
"It's Dianamite!" —Tom Wolfe
"[Tina Brown] tells the story fluently, with engrossing detail on every page, and with the mastery of tone that made her Tatler famous for being popular with the people it was laughing at." —The New Yorker
About the Author
Tina Brown is an award-winning writer, the former editor in chief of Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker, and the founder of The Daily Beast and of the live event platform Women in the World. She is the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Diana Chronicles, and in 2017 she published The Vanity Fair Diaries, chosen as one of the best books of the year by Time, People, The Guardian, The Economist, Entertainment Weekly, and Vogue. In 2000 she was awarded the CBE (Commander of the British Empire) by Queen Elizabeth II for her services to journalism. She lives in New York City.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Last Picture Show
Is she an angel?
—Helena Ussova, aged seven, land-mine victim in Angola, January 1997
Diana never looked better than in the days after her divorce. Divestment was the name of the game, in her life and in her looks. The downsizing started with her Kensington Palace staff, which she reduced to cleaner, cook, and dresser. The assiduous Paul Burrell became maître d’ of her private life, combining the roles of P.A., man Friday, driver, delivery boy, confidant, and crying towel. “He used to pad around listening to all,” says a friend of Diana’s mother. “I was quite sure his ear was pressed firmly to the key hole when I went to Kensington Palace for lunch.”
Diana reinforced her break with married life by stuffing a heavy-duty garbage bag with her entire set of Prince of Wales china and then smashing it with a hammer. “Make a list of everything we need,” she told Burrell. “Let’s spend a bit more of his money while we can.”
Diana now used police protection only when she attended a public event. Her favorite officer was Colin Tebbutt, who had retired from the Royal Squad. He was a tall, fair-haired matinee idol who was also a Class One driver, trained by the SAS. Tebbutt knew that by going to work for Diana he was effectively shutting the door to any future work with the Prince of Wales, but he had a soft spot for Diana. “There was always a buzz when she was at home. I thought she was beginning to enjoy life. She was a different lady, maturing.” Tebbutt says she would always sit in the front of the car, unlike the other Royals, such as Princess Margaret, who called him by his surname and, without looking up from her newspaper, barked, “Wireless!” when she wanted Tebbutt to turn on the radio.
“I drive looking in all three mirrors, so I’d say to Diana ‘I’m not looking at your legs, Ma’am’ and she’d laugh.” The press knew the faces of Diana’s drivers, so to shake them off Tebbutt sometimes wore disguises. “She wanted to go to the hairdresser one day, shortly before she died. I had an old Toyota MRT which she called the ‘tart trap,’ so I drove her in that. I went to the trunk and got out a big baseball hat and glasses. When she came out I was dripping with sweat, and she said ‘What on earth are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m in disguise.’ She said, ‘It may have slipped your notice, but I’m the Princess of Wales.’ ”
Every Tuesday night, the Princess sat at her desk in her study at Kensington Palace, writing her steady stream of heartfelt thank-you letters and listening to a piano playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and—her favorite—Manning Sherwin’s “A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square.” In the living room, Maureen Stevens, a clerk from the Prince of Wales’s office, who also happened to be a talented concert pianist, gave Diana a weekly private recital as she worked. You can almost hear Stevens’s piano rippling in the background as Diana writes a fulsome note to her close friend, Harper’s Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis: “Dearest Liz, How proud I was to be at your side on Monday evening… so deeply moved by your personal touch—the presents for the boys, candles at the hotel and flowers to name but few but most of all your beaming smile, your loving heart. I am always here for you, Liz.” Sometimes Diana would stop and telephone the Daily Mail’s Richard Kay—“Ricardo,” she called him—to help her with the phraseology of a letter. KP was her fortress. On warm summer afternoons, she vanished into its walled garden in shorts and T–shirt and her Versace sunglasses, carrying a bag of books and CDs for her Walkman. On weekends, when William and Harry were home, Burrell would see her in a flowing cotton skirt on her bicycle with the basket in front, speeding down the Palace drive with the boys pedaling furiously behind her. On her thirty–sixth birthday, in July, she received ninety bouquets of flowers and Harry gathered a group of classmates to sing “Happy Birthday” to her over the telephone.
Diana’s charity commitments were pared down from around a hundred to the six she most cared about: Centrepoint, the Royal Marsden Hospital, the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, the English National Ballet, the Leprosy Mission, and the National AIDS Trust. The public announcement she insisted on reaped her unnecessary flak and the resignation of her media adviser, Jane Atkinson. But Diana had a reason for being explicit. She wanted to avoid situations where she was just a letterhead. “If I’m going to talk on behalf of any cause, I want to go and see the problem for myself and learn about it,” she told the chairman of the Washington Post Company, Katharine Graham, at that time.
There was a round of social purging. Lord and Lady Palumbo were excised after Peter’s candid warnings about Martin Bashir. Elton John was in the deep freeze after acting as a go-between with Diana and Gianni Versace for the fashion designer’s coffee–table book Rock and Royalty. (The pictures of the Princess and the boys appeared amid a portfolio of seminude male models, and Diana feared it would further annoy the Queen.) Sir Ronald Grierson was bounced after he made the mistake of offering a job to one of the many secretaries Diana froze out. And Fergie was back in Siberia, this time for good. The divorced Duchess had cashed in with an anodyne memoir, which was full of nice comments about her sister–in–law— except for one fatal line. She wrote that when she borrowed a pair of Diana’s shoes she had caught a verrucca—plantar’s wart—from them. Goddesses don’t get warts. Despite Fergie’s pleading apologies, Diana never spoke to her again. In 1997, the Princess gave a birthday party for her friend David Tang and told him he could ask anyone he wanted.
“Anyone?” he asked.
“Anyone.”
“All right, then—Fergie.”
“Absolutely not,” Diana replied, and would not be moved.
A new and unexpected ally was Raine. In 1993, Diana had finally made her peace with her formidable stepmother. The painful years of separation and divorce from Charles made the Princess see her old adversary in a different light. Still grieving for Daddy, her greatest support, Diana was at last able to recognize that Raine had loved him, too. She invited her stepmother for a weepy reconciliation over lunch at Kensington Palace. For moral support, Raine brought along her fiancé, the French Count Jean François de Chambrun. The precaution turned out to be unnecessary. Afterward, the Princess and the Countess were often sighted deep in a tête–à–tête at the Connaught Grill. One of Raine’s cautions was to try to stay on friendly terms with Charles for the sake of the children. She told Diana that both she—Raine—and her mother, Barbara Cartland, had maintained warm relations with all their former husbands and lovers.
Diana also made an improbable friend of Katharine “Kay” Graham. They had met in the summer of 1994, when Lucia Flecha de Lima had brought Diana to Kay’s beachfront house on Martha’s Vineyard. Not long after that, Kay gave a luncheon for Diana and Hillary Clinton at her Washington home. At a British Embassy lunch on the same visit, Diana met Colin Powell again. He told her he had been nominated to lead her in the dancing at the gala that night to raise money for the Nina Hyde Breast Cancer Foundation. Scotland Yard had been worried that at a ball in Chicago earlier in the year a stranger had cut in on Diana’s dancing partner. The General was deemed able to handle such an eventuality, but the Princess suggested she do a few practice spins with him in the Embassy drawing room. “She was easy with any melody, and we did all right in our rehearsal,” says Powell. “She told me, ‘there’s only one thing you ought to know. I’ll be wearing a backless dress tonight. Can you cope with that?’ ” Flirting with the big boys—what bliss!
Diana thrived in America. “There is no ‘Establishment’ there,” she told her fashion friend Roberto Devorik—wrongly, of course, but correct in the sense that America had no Establishment whose rules or members could possibly hurt her feelings. Richard Kay says she thought of America as “a country so brimming over with glittery people and celebrities that she would be able to disappear.”
Like her life, Diana’s taste in fashion became pared down and emphatic after her divorce. “English style refracted through an un–English sensibility” was how Vogue’s Hamish Bowles defined it. Her new evening dresses were minimalist and sexy, a look that had been taboo when she was an in-house Royal. “She knew she had great legs and she wanted to show them off,” said the designer Jacques Azagury. She wore his stunning red bugle–bead tunic over a short pencil skirt in Venice in 1995 and his blue crystal–beaded cocktail dress six inches above the knee to another Serpentine gallery evening. Diana actually looked her best at her most informal. Jumping rangily out of her car for lunch with Rosa Monckton at the Caprice, wearing stone–washed jeans, a white T-shirt, a beautifully cut navy blue blazer, and bare feet in flats (she was usually shod in Jimmy Choo’s black grosgrain “Diana” loafers), she was spectacular. Vanity Fair assigned the Peruvian-born photographer Mario Testino to capture her as she now wanted to be seen: a modern woman, active on the world stage—“vivid, energetic, and fascinating,” in the words of Meredith Etherington–Smith, the former fashion editor who introduced Diana to Testino. When Meredith first saw Diana at Kensington Palace, she was astonished at how different she was from the formal, public Princess of old. Now she was “a tall, electrifying figure,” wearing no makeup and “revealing the truest English rose complexion. Her hair, no longer a stiff helmet, free of lacquer and back combing, flew around her head like a dandelion in the wind.” With her unerring sense of the dramatic, Diana timed Mario Testino’s stunning shots to come out on the cover of Vanity Fair the same week as her decree absolute.
Diana purged her closets of the past. She hated the sight of the froufrou’d and sequined relics of her roles as Princess Bride and Windsor Wife and Dynasty Di, embalmed in their suit bags. It was William’s brain wave for her to auction off her old gowns for charity in New York, and Diana loved her son’s creative notion. It would be at once a glorious psychic gesture to her new life and a boon to the charities she chose, the AIDS Crisis Trust and the Royal Marsden Hospital Cancer Fund. A royal rummage sale had never happened before. Most of the Windsor women, including the Queen, consign their old private-occasion items to a discreetly respectable resale shop in London’s West End. Diana’s auction would be a first.
Old clothes are often suffused with the emotions of the wearer. Meredith Etherington–Smith, who also worked as creative marketing director of Christie’s, was assigned by the auction house to help Diana choose and catalog the items. They sorted through Diana’s gowns every morning for a month while Diana relived the occasions when she had worn them. “Out! Out!” she would cry, pointing at some star–spangled throwback, or “No! I can’t bear to give up this one!” In and out of the catalog flew Victor Edelstein’s oyster dinner dress with a strapless bodice encrusted with white bugle beads and matching bolero, which she had worn that elegant night at the Élysée Palace in Paris with President and Madame Mitterrand. “It was such a happy evening,” she dithered. She had been afraid of the French being so chic, but she felt she had really pulled it off. She sighed over another Edelstein gown, an ink blue silk velvet creation. This was the dress in which she had wowed the world with John Travolta at the White House. She relinquished it in the end, knowing it would get the auction’s top dollar. (An anonymous bidder snapped it up for $222,500.) In retrospect, wrote the fashion maven Suzy Menkes in the International Herald Tribune, all the high-glamour outfits of Diana’s past looked “like a dress rehearsal for the little black number worn on the evening Prince Charles confessed his adultery on prime–time television.”
But now in the year after her divorce, relations with Prince Charles were on a nicely even keel, starting with that tea in July. The arrival in 1996 of Mark Bolland as Charles’s assistant private secretary inaugurated an era of glasnost between the offices of the Princess and the Prince. Bolland was a shrewd go–to guy with a marketing background and a useful four years of experience as director of the Press Complaints Commission. He lived in the real world, not the Palace bubble. He owed his job to Camilla; he had come to Charles at the recommendation of her divorce lawyer, Hilary Browne Wilkinson. In spite of that—or more likely because of it—part of his writ was to end the War between the Waleses. It got in the way, he believed, of the necessary rebuilding of Prince Charles’s image. Bolland’s first act was to persuade Charles to fire his private secretary, Commander Richard Aylard, the facilitator of the Dimbleby fiasco, and rid the Prince’s office of holdovers from the bitter years of marital competition. Nor was Bolland a fan of the undislodgeable Tiggy Legge–Bourke, sharing Camilla’s belief that Tiggy spent a lot of her time “winding Charles up.” Another positive augury, surely.
Better than all of the above, however, was that Diana’s love life had simplified in a wonderful way. In the fall of 1995, she had at last fallen for a man who was worthy of her affections, who wasn’t married, and who reciprocated her feelings: the thirty–six–year–old Pakistani heart surgeon Dr. Hasnat Khan.
Product details
- ASIN : 076792309X
- Publisher : Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (May 20, 2008)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 561 pages
- ISBN-10 : 9780767923095
- ISBN-13 : 978-0767923095
- Item Weight : 14.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.18 x 1.24 x 7.98 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #143,423 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #260 in Royalty Biographies
- #611 in Rich & Famous Biographies
- #1,738 in Women's Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
TINA BROWN is an award-winning writer and editor and founder of the Women in the World Summit. Between 1979 and 2001 she was the editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, and The New Yorker. Her 2007 biography of the Princess of Wales, The Diana Chronicles, topped the New York Times bestseller list. In 2008 she founded The Daily Beast. The Vanity Fair Diaries, her memoir covering the years she edited that magazine, was published in 2017. She lives in New York City.
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She did not, however, want for sympathy. All England and much of the world mourned her passing in a huge, spontaneous and amazing outpouring of love, respect and grief unequaled in our time except perhaps for the response of the American people to the assassination of John F, Kennedy. She remains enshrined, almost sanctified, in the memory of millions as a lovely, loving, tragic woman who died too soon.
In 482 pages this is the authoritative story of her life, But it is more than that: It is a long, sometimes sentimental, obituary written by a friend of Diana's who coincidentally is one of world's best journalists - and her talent shows.
Tina Brown had success from the start. At 25 she became the editor of Tatler, England's most famous glamour and gossip magazine; 6 years later she was Editor of the American equivalent - Vanity Fair - where she stayed for 8 years before leaving to revamp New Yorker magazine. She left New Yorker six years later (1992), had another publishing enterprise, then retired in 2005 to devote the next two years to writing this book; and she has done a good job. It's typical New Yorker feature style. - well written - beautifully written in fact - lots of trivia, factually accurate, detailed (almost too detailed - one tends to skim) and essentially non judgmental; and she had unusual entree to the actors in this drama and to their friends. As Lady Evans, the wife of Sir Harold Evans, editor of The Sunday Times, she was privileged to be a friend of Princess Diana and had better access to Palace sources than the rest of the press. She knew almost everyone involved, and she has used all this to describe the people and the times; but, superb journalist that she is, she has overlooked the essence of Diana's life - the sheer tragedy of it..
Tragedy both in the literary world and the real world involves a hero or heroine, a central character of uncommon valor or character who has one very human fault which brings about his or her untimely - usually terrible - death after which we have a catharsis of emotion. We truly grieve for him or her. Think Achilles or Hamlet or Cho Cho San or Agamemnon or poor Oedipus the blind.
Princess Diana fits the pattern perfectly. She was beautiful. She truly had a profound sympathy for the poor, the pitiful and the diseased; and she was able to translate this unaffectedly into help for their cause. "Thick as a plank" intellectually (her words), she was nevertheless unaffectedly charming, sincere, witty and loving. She was a true Princess in every sense of the word, a dedicated wife and consort to the Prince (initially), and always a loving mother to her two sons. She never failed in her public duties. In truth she was admired around the world for the way she performed them. She had courage. Real courage. She shook the hands of lepers, of AIDS victims and fought for the child victims of land mines, walking on dangerous but "cleared" paths through minefields to publicize their continuing danger. But she had one fault which eventually led her to the tunnel that night in Paris - her dream, the dream of a lovely not-too-well educated 17-year-old inexperienced bachelor girl who dreamed that she could marrythe Prince and become Queen of England.
Her dream came true at least in part. She did marry the Prince - in a memorable ceremony at St Paul's Cathedral, but she would never become Queen. Instead she entered into an impossible marriage to a man 13 years older, a man who lived a Royal life of staid tranquilityand who had never known another, a man with tastes broadly different from Diana's in almost every direction and a man who, no matter how much he tried, could never give his Princess the love any wife, royal or not, needs from her husband. Years before his marriage to Diana he had already given his love - the love Diana needed and deserved - to another woman, to Camilla Parker Bowles, and he could never retrieve that love from her and he never did.
The dream died hard, however. She did enter the castle. She was a Princess - nay, the Princess - and she played her part to perfection, but at a cost. In a loveless marriage where her every move was governed by custom and Royal routine she was a lovely bird in a velvet cage; and her personality, probably never the strongest, started to disintegrate. There was bulimia, a nasty eating disorder usually occurring in young adults (usually women) caused by low self-esteem. Eventually there were a couple of extra-marital affairs, also a sometime problem with some young marrieds. It has many causes but in Diana's case it was caused by Charles's consistent and flagrant cheating with Camilla. There was incessant stress caused by her non-stop schedule of appearances in Britain and abroad and there were incessant jealousies and quarrels caused by the constant propinquity of other Royals and the demanding schedule of their joint lives and there was always the problem of Charles and Camilla.
Finally there was divorce, other relationships and the end in that dark tunnel in the black of night. No playwright could construct a better ending to the drama; and I can imagine the opera which someone should write and the doleful tragic minor of the music - Puccini like - when at last the curtain comes slowly down on the stage which is empty save for a tendril of white smoke coming out of the mouth of the black tunnel stage center.
Tina Brown spares no one, Somewhat of a vulgarian, she tells it all, from telling us about Prince Charles' favorite coital position (something which I had always wondered about and needed to know!) to Princess Anne's apparent need for an "occasional roll in the hay" outside of marriage (glad to know that too!) to the routine infidelities of the upper classes and the routine of the Royal household and the inexcusable, almost criminal, personal trespasses of the British press.
I had to hold my nose through some of this gossip. However, I was struck by the fact that almost everyone who appears in this book cheated serially and continuously on wife or husband. This conduct was almost universally overlooked, even condoned, because the other party was equally active in someone else's bedroom. No marriage was stable in this society. Almost every family was dysfunctional; and money, title and a morally repugnant and socially useless lifestyle all came in the same package with class and aristocracy,
The same was also true also to a certain extent among the Royals, as those who are the direct descendants of the Queen Mother are known. However, they were and are just different. One does not become a Royal; one has no choice. One is born to the status and never leaves it. From birth to death there are nurses, tutors, equerries, chauffeurs, maids, cooks, butlers, valets, secretaries, to attend to every wish and every whim. If a Royal comes down a long carpeted hallway on the way to his apartment in Buckingham Palace and a passing servant can't hide , the servant stands respectfully with back to the wall, bowing until the royal has passed.
As described by Tina Brown (and I believe her) the Royal life is governed by habit, by custom and by convention. For example, for two months at the end of summer all- and I mean all - the Royals go to Balmoral in Scotland where they fish, picnic, shoot and ride. That wasn't Diana's "thing" but she did it. There are other conventions too. These complicate their lives, but just doing them, getting through them with grace is their job. Diana did these too - and well.
On the other hand the Royals are people too; they can't avoid their humanity. As described by Tina Brown (and again I think she's correct) the Royals come across as being like any other family in many ways. There is family unity and love as well as the same family problems most of us non-royals encounter as we go through our more prosaic life. Flung together as they are in a structured world and removed from the real world the Royals are a bit stiffer personally, a bit more reserved and less free than are those of us who have to bend to the world. Diana was a part of this family and this world. Yet she wasn't. She wasn't born to it; nor was she temperamentally suited for it. She was loving, outgoing and naturally charming. One can't say the same about most of the royals.
I think most Americans reading Tina Brown's detailed descriptions of Royal privilege and Royal life probably wonder why the British put up with it; and as an American for eleven generations and thus removed from my English ancestors since 1630 the Royal life is completely foreign to me as it is to most Americans. What we forget, however, is that the Royals represent their England to the British. They represent the same continuity of national pride and purpose, as does the Statue of Liberty or the Lincoln Memorial to Americans. But I have digressed. Back to Diana.
Before putting this document away I want to cover two topics - the press and Diana's legacy.
With respect to the press: The British tabloid press was and is a disgrace to the English-speaking world. Insincere, shallow, conniving, dishonest, malevolent, malicious, vile, intrusive and vicious it is essentially first and foremost selfish without a shred of responsibility , without decency or concern about what or whom they cover, and the press particularly takes on the Royals. Every secret, every confidence' every action appears in headlines. The Royals have no privacy. They are not persons to the press; they are objects. The extent of my contempt for the British press as described by Tina Brown is beyond my ability to state in words. It is my visceral reaction to their manifold intrusions into private lives, ruining reputations without truth or reason, buying confidences, trading in dishonesty while at the same time clothing themselves in sanctimonious honesty that offends me. While I think the dishonesty of the American press is a concern, that of the British press is beyond explanation and I am afraid it can only end in repression and censorship - which it richly deserves.
About Diana's legacy. It will be monumental. She was all of three persons rolled into one. She had the charm and looks of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, the genuine interest in social causes of Eleanor Roosevelt and the genuine selfless love for the poor, the unfortunate, the diseased and the oppressed of Mother Theresa. Most of the world does not yet realize how unique she truly was. Moreover she was and is the stuff for grand opera - a tragic story from the time she met Charles until that night in the dark tunnel where the first person on the scene was a photographer who paused to take her picture as she lay dying. So much for the British tabloids!
It's a good book, but it's long
There are some shortcomings in Brown's approach, however. She assumes her audience is familiar with the biggest events in Diana's life, and this causes her to downplay or even omit some of the most famous moments or quotes. Brown makes most chapters thematic rather than strictly chronological; the text weaves among adjoining years, making it more confusing than it needs to be to discern what happened when. Perhaps to avoid overdramatizing complex material, Brown tends not establish turning points or a strong narrative arc. Her text may be highly accurate, but there is not a clear sense of just when and how Diana and her relationship with Charles are changing. The book is highly readable throughout, but it becomes more gripping where there is more of a recounting of events, for example on Diana's last night in Paris and during the week leading up to her funeral.
In some places it seems that Diana's story is still too recent for a clear historical perspective-- or maybe Brown was less able to get people to talk, especially about the period between the BBC interview and Diana's death, where the pieces don't all seem to fit together. Brown makes much of Diana's loneliness in this period, yet she mentions various close friendships Diana had at the time-- perhaps Brown just doesn't have an inside perspective on any of them. The closeness Diana established with her sister Sarah McCorquodale toward the end, which other writers have noted, goes unmentioned. For this last period, Brown seems to have less clear evidence, but perhaps also less of the detachment she brings to earlier sections of Diana's story.
At times, Brown seems to apportion space to events based more on the information she has, or her desire to analyze, than on their relative importance. Hence we have a lengthy discussion of whether Diana trysted with Charles on the royal train during their engagement, but a comparatively brief (and not especially definitive) discussion of claims that James Hewitt might have been involved with Diana early enough to have fathered Prince Harry.
People like me, who can't get enough information about Diana-- and know a lot already-- will love this book. Those needing more of a primer would get a clearer, if more one-sided view of her life from Morton's "Diana: Her True Story." For the long term, the value of Brown's book may lie in her having gathered so much evidence from Diana's contemporaries. But a definitive biography seems to await a historian's judgment.
Top reviews from other countries
He leído varías biografías de Diana en un intento por comprender su carisma, su magia y su complicada forma de ser, ya que ella padecía el trastorno límite de personalidad (borderline) y sin ese conocimiento su conducta privada es incomprensible.
Este es un buen libro, pero me gustó más el The Palace Papers de la misma autora, que está más interesante, quizá por ser más actual.
Her relationship with the Press was a complex one. We know Diana liked to play cat-and-mouse with them at times, and that she did sometimes alert them when she was going to be somewhere. But at the same time, particularly after the 1992 Separation from Charles, their behaviour was abhorrent. They would of often hurl abuse at her in the street, screaming "bitch!", just so that they could get a reaction from her. Without having the protection of the Palace anymore, it was open season on her. I do like the author's way with words, and her descriptions are often colourful or funny. She doesn't dwell in huge detail on the final Summer, but that has been pretty extensively covered in other books. Yes, Diana could be selfish and manipulative (she shafted poor old Fergie, who trusted her!), and the awful way she and her brother treated their stepmother Raine after the death of their father was brutal. But, having said all that, Diana and Raine did reach a rapprochement in the end, and Sarah Ferguson never seems to have held any grudges against her. And towards the end there were even glimmerings that she and Charles may have reached some kind of harmony. It's impossible not to speculate how things might have worked out if a certain other person hadn't been on the scene. But we are where we are. Well worth a read.