The Diana Chronicles: 20th Anniversary Commemorative Edition

by Tina Brown

there was no secure female role model anywhere in Diana’s childhood to make up for the exit of her mother.

Great English families rise and fall because of their proximity either to the throne or to the heart of politics.

Before Frances was even out of school Ruth went into action like a high-voltage Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice.

‘When you meet someone at the age of 15 and get engaged just five months out of school at 17, you can look back and ask “Was I adult?” I sure thought I was at the time.’

subjected her to a humiliating battery of tests to discover why she produced only girls.

Prince Andrew, the Queen’s second son, was always supposed to be the one earmarked for Diana.

When the distraught Frances left without them after Christmas, the children were told she was soon coming back. It was the first of the big emotional lies that undermined Diana’s faith in the empirical world. Diana later told her friend Cosima Somerset that her mother’s exit was ‘the most painful thing in her life, that the children weren’t told why she was leaving permanently’.

During her marriage to Prince Charles she was always listening at doors, as she had as a child, seeking confirmation of the worst.

The rift between Frances and her mother caused by the custody hearing never healed. It also planted in Diana a potent ambivalence about the Establishment.

Diana never used her position, as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis did, to invite an interesting mix of people to dinner parties. Socially, she felt inadequate.

For things she wanted, she batted her eyelids at her father and guilt-tripped her mother with tears.

obsessed with the idea of romance.

Aristocratic kids are almost aggressively laid-back in their style.

All through Diana’s life, the vindictiveness of her spite when it was aroused went beyond the tantrum of a spoilt child.

There is something oddly affecting about these conspicuously inconspicuous years of Diana, the ‘country girl’ lost in an apparently aimless drift in SW1. Knowing her destiny as we do we can see that interlude as she eventually saw it, as the last dreamy lull before the blaze of her future.

Once status is assured, you can pretend that it’s meaningless.

Is there anything we don’t know about Prince Charles, including his desire to return to this life as a Tampax?

The Queen never wrote to express her condolences to Mountbatten’s two daughters – Patricia, 2nd Countess Mountbatten and Lady Pamela Hicks, India’s mother.

By 1980, if Diana hadn’t existed they would have had to invent her.

The arc of Diana’s ascendance in Charles’s life was thus always entwined with the arc of Camilla’s.

Camilla knew that as a woman with a past she could never be accepted as Charles’s wife. But she also thought that Diana was someone whom she could manipulate

The Windsor rules were never rethought. ‘You are either with them or dead,’ the Duchess of Windsor once said to the actress Lilli Palmer. With them AND dead, is how Diana felt. It rained and rained.

Caught between his mother’s requirement of duty and his wife’s requirement of him, the Prince of Wales couldn’t win.

I was struck by how odd it must be to always be coming upon silent people who stand there waiting to be addressed.

Professor Hubert Lacey, an expert on eating disorders, believes that Diana’s defeatist obsession with Camilla was a replay of how she experienced her father’s relationship with Raine, something she couldn’t beat.

It was Charles’s love Diana wanted, not his ‘concern’.

Diana, it seemed to them, was simply unable to come to grips with the double reality of being an international celebrity in the eyes of billions of people while simultaneously, in the Palaces and apartments where she actually spent most of her time, being treated as just a cog in the royal machine. That she struggled with that duality was the difference between being born and raised a royal and becoming one, as it were, by adoption.

The Palace usually only bother to deny something that’s true.

All divas eventually subjugate the world around them to support the qualities and conditions that allow them to shine.

There was little real satisfaction in her life. Does it really matter if the needs of the public also happened to serve her own need for applause?

By the time it comes out, the anger that fuelled it rarely feels as it did when first committed to paper or tape.

Whenever she wasn’t out being the People’s Princess, she was inside her cage, wondering what to do with all that energy and charisma, which could find outlet only in the adulation of others.

she was a great mother and very bad to herself.’

Here was something else the Prince and Princess shared: the blindness of privilege, an inability to see a decision from any perspective but their own.

For Diana, William’s response was the one that mattered. ‘Don’t worry, Mummy,’ he told her when he learned that she no longer had the title. ‘I will give it back to you one day when I am King.’

But it’s hard to stay a lovely warm thing when your husband has always been in love with someone else.

The murder of the flamboyant fashion star Gianni Versace in South Beach on 15 July, while Diana was afloat on Al Fayed’s yacht, was a meteor shower in the exploding sky of her final summer.

To keep the boys from breaking down along the route Philip talked to them quietly about each of the historic landmarks of London they passed.