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What The 25th Anniversary Tributes To Diana Left Out
Popular images of the princess have grown hazier — and less complete — over time
Note: Tina Brown’s The Diana Chronicles (Doubleday, 2007) came out just before 10th anniversary of the death of the princess, and I reviewed it not long afterward. That biography, although flawed, gave a fuller picture of Diana than some of the more hagiographic 25th anniversary tributes published last week, and — without updating my original review— I’m reposting it here for that reason.
Diana Spencer was nine years old when her father sent her to a boarding school where, Tina Brown tells us, she won “perhaps the most endearing airhead award ever: the prize for best-kept guinea pig.” Her next school didn’t seem to do much more to develop her mind — the only admissions requirement was “neat handwriting.”
With sharp observations like these, Tina Brown comes close to pulling a rabbit out of a diamond tiara in The Diana Chronicles. In this biography she tells us little that hasn’t been said by others about Diana’s overall character and motivations. What she does say often comes from sources that are unnamed or so dubious that they might not have made it past the fact-checkers at Vanity Fair or The New Yorker, magazines she used to edit.
