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The Diana Chronicles Kindle Edition
"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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherAnchor
- Publication dateJune 12, 2007
- File size4.2 MB
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From the Publisher
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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
percent. In 2000, Ms. Brown was awarded C.B.E. (Commander of the British Empire) from Queen Elizabeth. She is married to Sir Harold Evans. The couple have two children and reside in New York.
From The Washington Post
I wonder if Tina Brown ever had the Queen Dream? Back in the mid-'80s, around the time Brown moved from editing London's Tatler to Vanity Fair, an astonishing 65 percent of the English -- including actors Judi Dench, Alec Guinness and several socialist politicians -- confessed to dreaming of a cozy tête-à-tête with Her Majesty. (Full disclosure: I had my second tea-with-the-Queen dream after reading Brown's book. It ended in a genteel food-fight, amid gales of chummy laughter.)
For those who haven't had the pleasure, Brown's jam-packed, juicy roll in the high cotton is even better, fragrant with the rich schadenfreude that makes Top People so much easier to bear. And in return for its rumored $2 million advance, it includes shovelfuls of hot fresh dirt, tucked among the standard (and amazingly detailed) iconic fare. Remember the sex-soaked phone tapes (Diana as Squidgy, or Charles's Tampax fantasy)? Remember the Royal Love Train? Dueling media manipulation? Jealous attention-grabbing? Top-of-the-line adultery, divorce and money-grubbing?
One charming image is new to me: The night before her fairy-tale wedding, the just-turned 20 Lady Diana Spencer gobbled everything in sight, got "sick as a parrot" (presumably to fit into her wedding dress) and then, at loose ends, tripped gaily downstairs at Clarence House to chat with the Queen Mum's elderly page. Spotting the old boy's bike, she hopped on and began peddling joyfully in circles, jingling the bell and singing over and over, "I'm going to marry the Prince of Wales tomorrow!"
That triumphant crow crowned months, if not years, of meticulous plotting -- not only by Diana, but also by the desperate-for-a-virgin-bride Windsor tribe, all laid out here for our delectation like a really good hunt breakfast. It also heralded the dawn of 16 years of hell. Hell for Di, hell for the Royals, hell for everyone but the press -- hell that didn't even end on Aug. 31, 1997, the night the black Mercedes carrying Di and her coke-snorting beau crashed into a wall of the Pont D'Alma tunnel in Paris, kicking off a decade of conspiracy theories, to which Brown gives a rather cursory and politic nod.
As it happened, Diana's bike caper was entirely in character. All her life, Earl Spencer's daughter hung with the help. Skimpily educated, she learned everything she knew below stairs at her family's splendid Althorp estate. She loved the gossip and chatter of housemaids and pastry cooks. Personally, I've always thought that her total ease with the British press -- and the reason its hard-boiled hacks fell so madly in love with her -- was that deep-down she considered them all matey surrogates for the gang in the scullery back home. She relished menial work, too -- to clean house, to wash and iron clothes, nanny small children and cook bread-and-butter pudding for the staff, was bliss. During her honeymoon aboard the royal yacht Britannia, as her cerebral Prince buried himself in the highbrow books of Laurens van der Post, Di slipped away whenever possible to crash the crew's parties. At one point, she had to be elbowed away from playing the piano for a crowd of cheering sailors. Even her accent -- flat, affectless and airing some surprisingly vulgar vowel-sounds -- struck many snobs as stunningly low-class for an earl's daughter. (In Charles's and Camilla's set, they use funny vowels, too, but they're the right funny vowels: "House" is pronounced "hice." "Very" is "virry." "Bouncy" is "bincey." Don't try this at home.)
Perhaps most important, Diana read what housemaids read -- down-and-dirty tabloids and sugary shy-virgin-marries-the-prince romances. Barbara Cartland, the pink-ostrich-plumed mother of Di's own hated stepmother, Raine, wrote hundreds of these, and would claim they were Diana's downfall: "They weren't awfully good for her." Fifteen years after the wedding (to which she wasn't invited), the Queen of Romance opined that the marriage was doomed all along because Diana "wouldn't do oral sex." Well, that wasn't in the romance novels, was it? But while we're down here in the trouser zone, it's worth noting that Diana herself called her marriage's sexual problems "geographical," and reported that Charles only sought her out every three weeks. We now learn that Charles likes to be called "Arthur" at the height of his amorous endeavors. Who would know? Not Di. But Camilla would, with her "long, languid understanding of her man" and her striking physical resemblance to his beloved childhood nanny.
The sour wisdom Brown gleaned during decades spent editing chic magazines glints throughout her book, like rhinestones under sackcloth. She blames Diana's bulimia on media exposure, pure and simple: "Us magazine today is filled with the sunken cheeks of formerly pneumatic starlets who are turned by round-the-clock exposure into tiny famished ghosts attached to hair weaves." "For women over thirty-five, glamour has three Stations of the Cross: denial, disguise, and compromise. As she entered her thirty-seventh year, Diana told herself she was looking for love. But what she was really seeking was a guy with a Gulfstream."
The young Diana was no angel. As a child she tormented her unlucky nannies. She locked one in a bathroom; she threw another's undies out the window; she spiked one's cushions with pins; she tossed another's engagement ring down the drain. As a teen, when James Gilbey stood her up on a date, she poured flour-and-egg paste all over his Alfa Romeo. When she and her sisters read about their father's marriage to Raine, recently divorced from the Earl of Dartmouth, and realized that they, the girls, hadn't been invited to the ball, she confronted the groom, hauled off and slapped his face. "That's from all of us, for hurting us," she said, before stalking out and slamming the door.
Word of the guerrilla warfare she launched against her new stepmother -- poison pen notes, harassing phone calls, yanking out the wiring from beneath the floorboards -- might have given the Royal Family pause before they launched their relentless campaign to have the heir to the throne marry England's sole remaining high-born virgin. One night, perhaps sensing she was being short-changed, she became so enraged with Charles kneeling beside his bed in prayer that she bonked him on the head with the family Bible. She used the f-word with some frequency. And she had an especially soft spot for garbage bags: When stepmother Raine was finally kicked out of Althorp, upon Earl Spencer's death in '92, Di had Raine's glorious clothes unpacked from her "S"-emblazoned Vuitton suitcases, stuffed into garbage bags and then kicked downstairs. (Her brother Charles, heir to the Spencer title, bowled Raine's other possessions after them.) And after her divorce from Prince Charles, she shoved the priceless Prince of Wales china into a heavy-duty garbage bag and went at it with a hammer and a will.
A great glory of this book is the behind-the scenes close-ups of life at the various castles, palaces and Stately Homes. Picture Diana on her first two-month boot-camp in Balmoral, the sovereign's Scottish retreat: The long days slaughtering wildlife, picnics in the freezing rain, dinners seated between two elderly courtly stiffs ("heavy furniture" in Di-speak); Prince Philip booming on for hours about the evils of trade unions; Princess Anne barking about her day's kill; the Queen's bagpipers at last wheezing traditional Scottish airs around the table to signal time for the women to leave, perhaps for tiddlywinks and jigsaws. As nobody ever goes to bed before the Queen, Di could be stuck listening to Princess Margaret tinkling old show tunes on the piano until 2 a.m.
London's Kensington Palace, the luxurious grace-and-favor royal compound in which Diana and Charles lived for some time after their marriage, was a hive of loathing. Princess Anne called Diana "the Dope." Diana called the Austrian-born Prince Michael of Kent "the Führer" and "the U-Boat Commander."
Diana had not, of course, married for chums, a good time or even ambition, but for her ideal of romantic love. Finally understanding that Charles would always love Camilla Parker Bowles, and never her, she began the string of affairs that spiced up the end of her short life. Brown really goes to town here. She, worldly piece of work that she is, thinks everything would have been hunky-dory if Di had only got it on with Prince Philip, the Queen's consort. He fancied her anyway, and it would have kept the fuss inside the family. But Di aimed lower. Her first affair, Tina believes, was with Di's cockney bodyguard Barry Mannakee. For this flash, Tina pumped Di's pal Dr. James Colthurst, who helped the Princess tape all the dirt used by Andrew Morton in Diana: Her True Story, the H-bomb dropped on the House of Windsor in 1992. Not only had Diana admitted an affair, Colthurst said, but she thought Barry was "bumped off" when he died. Next came the red-haired Life Guards Maj. James Hewitt, her (and the boys') riding instructor. Later, when the discarded and broke Hewitt sold his memoirs, he was widely scorned as the Love Rat.
Was he or was he not the father of ginger-haired Prince Harry? Tina thinks so. "Well, I don't know what she was doing at the time," Prince Charles once responded, not too gallantly, when the subject arose. A succession of tall, handsome beaux, both before and after the official royal separation of Dec. 9, 1992, were dubbed "the Dianamen" and the "42 Longs" by her bodyguards. She fell hard for married art dealer, Oliver Hoare, becoming his "phone sex pest." She carried on with Will Carling, the rugby star. But by this time, she was already evolving into Saint Diana. The spurned but genuinely kind and empathetic princess comforted the sick, embraced AIDS patients, shook lepers' hands, touched bloody bandages. As she bent to speak to dying children or tenderly caress the wheelchair-bound, she seemed a veritable healing angel.
And now, she had a great love. He was a Pakistani heart surgeon, Dr. Hasnat Khan. Impressed that the devout Muslim would not consummate their affair until her divorce decree was absolute, Diana actually considered converting to Islam. She bought several sexy Pakistani outfits -- love those bare midriffs! -- cooked for him, ironed his shirts, vacuumed his modest apartment, and for his birthday turned up wearing sapphire-and-diamond earrings and a fur coat with nothing beneath. Ah, l'amour! And glamour! Unfortunately, his large, close family wanted him to marry a nice Muslim girl, and he obliged. Poor Dodi Fayed, who died in the Paris crash, was really just a stand-in.
Diana's tragicomedy is Shakespearean in scale, with its slippery royal machinations, its agonized ironies, its seething jealousies and heartbreaking inevitability. Brown is no Shakespeare. But she gives us a walloping good read.
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
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 h...
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Product details
- ASIN : B000SCHAJY
- Publisher : Anchor; 1st edition (June 12, 2007)
- Publication date : June 12, 2007
- Language : English
- File size : 4.2 MB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 778 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #231,780 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #17 in Welsh History
- #178 in Biographies of Royalty (Kindle Store)
- #227 in Historical British 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.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the book informative and well-written. They appreciate the author's insights and eloquent writing style. The book is described as empathetic, emotional, and balanced in its portrayal of Diana's life. However, some readers feel the length could be edited and the use of obscure words and phrases was excessive.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers enjoy the book's readability. They find it an excellent, entertaining read with good sourcing. The last chapters are enjoyable and emotional for them. Readers appreciate the author's well-researched biography about Diana, Princess of Wales.
"...It's worth reading but I won't be taking it off the shelf very often." Read more
"...I can definitely recommend the book as absolutely excellent reading." Read more
"...as a journalist and editor covering Diana, makes The Diana Chronicles an excellent read...." Read more
"I enjoyed this book very much. What I didn't like was the writers excessive use of huge, obscure words as descriptive adjectives...." Read more
Customers find the book informative and well-written. They appreciate the author's analytical approach and factual information about the couple. The book provides an unbiased and interesting perspective on the events.
"...- beautifully written in fact - lots of trivia, factually accurate, detailed (almost too detailed - one tends to skim) and essentially non judgmental..." Read more
"...History book style, not tabloid like Christopher Andersen's "After Diana"...." Read more
"...I felt like the author added the perfect amount of detail so that you could understand the issues from all sides and for most of the book I could..." Read more
"...reason to read The Diana Chronicles is that it is a chronicle of our own recent history...." Read more
Customers find the book well-written and readable. They praise the author as an excellent writer who does proper research to present a true picture.
"...It's typical New Yorker feature style. - well written - beautifully written in fact - lots of trivia, factually accurate, detailed..." Read more
"The book is very well written, probably one of the better "Diana" books to come out this year...." Read more
"...The Diana Chronicles was so well written I could hardly put it down even though the size of it is daunting...." Read more
"...special not only for Tina's Brown's ultra-smooth, brisk and captivating writing style, but also the author's own status: Brown is a well-placed..." Read more
Customers find the book empathetic and emotional. They appreciate the author's compassion for the poor, pitiful, and diseased. The book portrays the author as loving and generous.
"...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..." Read more
"...Nevertheless, this book is a sympathetic, highly balanced portrayal of the life and times of a beloved personality who left us far too soon." Read more
"...She was a lovely person, and a beautiful generous soul who touched so many lives and never got anything but cold indifference and derision in return..." Read more
"...The story itself was tragic...." Read more
Customers find the book provides a comprehensive look into Diana's life. They find it honest and balanced, with good quality photos that make it easy to visualize the entire panorama of this fascinating tale. The book shows a different side to the Princess.
"...remains enshrined, almost sanctified, in the memory of millions as a lovely, loving, tragic woman who died too soon...." Read more
"...I was pleased to find not only plenty of wit and lots of glamour, but also a deep, well researched biography...." Read more
"...Diana is supremely blessed with several gifts: her phenomenal beauty and style and, most importantly, her great empathy...." Read more
"Tina Brown has put together a remarkably multifaceted portrait of Diana...." Read more
Customers appreciate the author's unbiased coverage of the facts. They find it fair and interesting, showing both sides of the story. The author has an insight into the world of the Establishment and maintains objectivity. They say the book is an eye-opener to understanding the British Monarchy and what happened to Diana.
"...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..." Read more
"...the information about Princess Diana's background and family situation was most interesting...." Read more
"...I think it is because Tina actually met Diana and understands how the Royal family works...." Read more
"...sympathy to all points of view while maintaining objectivity (and backing up conclusions with evidence), and, most differently,..." Read more
Customers have different views on the book's wit. Some find it charming, sincere, and reflective. Others describe it as silly, vile, and biased.
"...I was pleased to find not only plenty of wit and lots of glamour, but also a deep, well researched biography...." Read more
"...Reading the book I felt like I knew Diana - the writing was that intimate...." Read more
"...Insincere, shallow, conniving, dishonest, malevolent, malicious, vile, intrusive and vicious it is essentially first and foremost selfish without a..." Read more
"...the relevance to the debate over the monarchy, she has the lingo and manners down pat, having existed on the inside of the aristoratic fringe, and..." Read more
Customers find the book too long, with an excessive use of obscure words. They also mention that the printing is small and difficult to read.
"...was so well written I could hardly put it down even though the size of it is daunting...." Read more
"I enjoyed this book very much. What I didn't like was the writers excessive use of huge, obscure words as descriptive adjectives...." Read more
"...However, the printing of the story is very small and difficult to read at best. So unfortunately I gave only two stars. Feeling disappointed. 😒..." Read more
"...But I feel the book needed editing as it was way too long. But if you like gossip you'll like this book!" Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2011Diana Frances Spencer was the third child of the 9th Earl Spencer of Althorp and his wife Frances. She was book ended by two gorgeous sisters and a handsome red headed brother Charles. Nobody paid much attention to her until at 18, beautiful and virginal, she met 31 year old Charles, Prince of Wales and heir to the throne of England,. Within months she had married him and commenced another life and a career which soared to unimaginable heights as she became HRH The Princess of Wales and which then came crashing down 17 years later in a dark underpass in Paris when, accompanied by her Egyptian boyfriend, she was killed in a car which lost control at 70 mph. She died, divorced, single and wanting for the riches she had enjoyed as the Queen in waiting.
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
- Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2007The book is very well written, probably one of the better "Diana" books to come out this year. You won't find much that you haven't read before (big bibliography at the end, if you've heard of it- it's in there), the most irritating thing about it is that the extensive footnotes are also in the back of the book and they barely lead you to the point of interest on the revelant page. History book style, not tabloid like Christopher Andersen's "After Diana".
No point in rehashing all 542 pages except to say that Ms. Brown would probably get her face slapped by the Princess for some of the content (I think sometimes even fairly so, but it might balance out in the end), she quotes Paul Burrell many times- yet never misses a chance to bash him (that seems to be a very popular thing to do among Diana writers), and has no use for Camilla.
It's worth reading but I won't be taking it off the shelf very often.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2024I have never been a Diana follower - when all the events of her life were unfolding, I was having babies and could have cared less about what was happening in Buckingham Palace. I did not watch the wedding or buy any of the tabloids detailing her escapades.
When the video series, "The Crown" became available on Amazon, I watched every episode and found the story absolutely riveting. I must admit I was surprised that the royal family allowed so much of their private life to be revealed. I doubt that the average American would want their family saga portrayed for the whole world to watch and judge. I must admit that I was somewhat skeptical of the story and went to several websites asking the question, "How accurate is The Crown?"
After watching the last season that was mainly about Diana, I wanted to know more about her. To say that her life was tragic is an understatement and it was puzzling to me how it could have degenerated to what it was.
The Diana Chronicles was so well written I could hardly put it down even though the size of it is daunting. I felt like the author added the perfect amount of detail so that you could understand the issues from all sides and for most of the book I could not tell "whose side she was on" between Charles and Diana. She was also fair to the Queen and to Prince Philip and I did not get the impression she was out to get rid of the royalty altogether.
The story itself was tragic. I do not come from celebrity, wealth and privilege and that makes it hard to understand why people in those circumstances find it so difficult to be happy. When you consider all the good they could do and the many opportunities they have to be a blessing to other people, it's hard to know why they cannot find peace.
It brings to mind the scripture in Matthew 16:24 - "Then Jesus told His disciples, 'If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?'"
Peace is found only when we live outside of ourselves, considering the needs of others as important as our own. It appears that Queen Elizabeth found that to be true but Charles and Diana did not.
I can definitely recommend the book as absolutely excellent reading.
Top reviews from other countries
- Anne E.Reviewed in Canada on October 23, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Very thorough and well researched
I was very impressed with and enjoyed reading this book. It was very thorough and well researched and very readable. The beginning of the book painted Diana in a bad light but I kept reading and could see how she evolved into the person she ultimately became.
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LeireReviewed in Mexico on April 24, 2023
4.0 out of 5 stars Interesante y ameno
Me gusta mucho el estilo de Tina Brown. Me parece que tiene una opinión sensata y equilibrada.
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.
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Felixj1812Reviewed in Spain on March 5, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Excelente
Un placer de lectura
- Sarah HapgoodReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 2, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars a good read
I re-read this one again recently after a gap of several years, and if anything, it is even better than I remembered it. This is one of the best of the numerous books about Diana. I would cite this one and Tim Clayton's business-like biography as two of the better ones. Like Clayton, Tina Brown does a good job of a balanced overview. It is neither a hagiography or a hatchet-job. She doesn't gloss over Diana's mistakes. Most noticeably in her lost soul years in the early 90s, when she seemed to be careering around like a loose cannon, making several mistakes, including the telephone stalking of Oliver Hoare and the farce of the gym pictures. But even taking all that on board, you still feel sympathy for her. She was scared, particularly of what the future might hold (justifiably as it turned out!), what her role would be, and probably frightened she might lose custody of her children, as her mother had done. Her parents horribly acrimonious divorce constantly haunted her.
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.
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EvelyneReviewed in France on July 30, 2018
5.0 out of 5 stars The Diana chronicles
Le livre est écrit par quelqu'un qui aimait beaucoup Diana mais l'auteur reste objective et n'hésite pas à casser l'image glamour de la princesse dépensière et à révéler un personnage psychologiquement plus qu'instable : malade. Son obsession de vengeance l'a malheureusement conduite à sa perte.