Product Description

Ten years after her death, Princess Diana remains a mystery. Was she "the people's princess," who electrified the world with her beauty and humanitarian missions? Or was she a manipulative, media-savvy neurotic who nearly brought down the monarchy? Tina Brown knew Diana personally, knows her world, understands its players, and has far-reaching insight into the royals and the Queen herself. In "The Diana Chronicles", you will meet a formidable female cast and get to know the society they inhabit...as you never have before.Diana's sexually charged mother, her subtly scheming grandmother, the stepmother she hated but eventually came to understand, and a terrifying trio of in-laws and relations: Fergie, the force of nature whose life was full of its own unacknowledged pathos; Princess Margaret, the fading glamour girl; the implacable Queen Mother and more formidable than all of them, 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 felt the need to break out of her royal cage into celebrity culture, where she found her own power and used it to devastating effect.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #154988 in Books
• Published on: 2008-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 496 pages

Helen Mirren
"Intensely well researched and an un putdown able read...It is a
tragi-comedy, a soap opera, a social commentary a historical document and a
psychological examination, written by a superb investigative journalist."

From the Back Cover
'Intensely well researched and an un-put-down-able read, Tina Brown's extraordinary book parts the brocaded velvet , lifts the expensive net curtains and allows us an unprecedented look at the world and mind of the most famous person on the planet. It is a tragi-comedy, a soap opera, a social commentary, a historical document and a psychological examination, written by a superb investigative journalist.'
-Academy Award Winning Actress Helen Mirren

Ten years after her death, Princess Diana remains a mystery. Was she "the people's princess," who electrified the world with her beauty and humanitarian missions? Or was she a manipulative, media-savvy neurotic who nearly brought down the monarchy?

Tina Brown knew Diana personally, knows her worlds,understands itsplayers, and has far-reaching insight into the royals and the Queen herself.In The Diana Chronicles, you will meet a formidable female cast and get toknow thesocietythey inhabit.. as you never have before

‘The Diana Chronicles is a blockbuster: a rollicking, page-turning, fast quipping, gripping romp of a read. It is the work of a seasoned, serious journalist.’ The Times

‘Authoratative and well researched, Tina Brown's book should become standard reading material about the People's Princess’ Tatler

‘The Diana Chronicles is an enjoyable romp. There are funny moments and Brown in an astute observer of people.Tina Brown is the biographer the princess deserves.’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Tina Brown makes Diana as deeply fascinating as the great heroines of literature. She is magnificent at creating atmosphere’Daily Express

About the Author
Tina Brown was twenty-five when she became editor-in-chief of The Tatler, reviving the nearly defunct 270 year old magazine. She went on to become editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, and in 1992 she became the first female editor of The New Yorker. In 200, Tina Brown was awarded a C.B.E. She is married to Sir Harold Evans and has two children. They reside in New York.

Customer Reviews

An insightful and highly readable account of Diana's life
This is a well written and compulsively readable book, which captures the essence of Diana better than any other biography I've read - and I've read many. Most books about Diana seem fall into one of two camps: either they are overly gushing and sympathetic (eg Andrew Morton, Paul Burrell) or they are critical in the extreme (eg Lady Colin Campbell, Patrick Jephson). Tina Brown is neither. She calls Diana out on her untruths (it's highly unlikely that Diana deliberately threw herself down the stairs) but also points out where her paranoia was justified (yes, the Squidgeygate tapes were deliberately released).

There's not a lot of new material here (what was there left to find out?), but it's a very comprehensive look at Diana's life that pulls together all the various things that are known about her in such a way that you feel that you are viewing the truest and most complete picture yet. It also gave me a strong sense of what life behind the Palace walls is actually like and why Diana felt so isolated and uncomfortable there.

Tina Brown is particularly good at getting inside Charles and Diana's heads: explaining Charles's misgivings at the time of the engagement or Diana's thoughts when she agreed to the divorce. At one point she refers to Diana being a tactician rather than a strategist (always going for the short term win rather than thinking of the long game), which I thought was a very astute observation. She discusses the Charles/Diana/Camilla triangle at great length, and ultimately concludes that quite possibly the marriage could have worked had Camilla not been ever-present (Camilla doesn't come across very well at all).

This is a long book which starts a little slowly, but from the time that Diana meets Charles it races along. It's amusing, it's insightful and it leaves you wistful for what could have been.

A cool glittering read
Unlike those who seem to have hastily dashed off a line of abuse without much evidence of having read the book, I have indeed read it.
I have read no other royal biographies, and I read this one because I'm interested in the subject and because Tina Brown was one of the foremost editors of her day so whatever she has to say will at least be interesting.

As others have noted, there are no new revelations, no previously untapped sources. What Tina Brown does is to impose her cool, critical intelligence on Diana, her life, and particularly her relationship with the media. Aged 25, Brown was editor of Tatler, the Sloane's house journal and the early parts of the book which deal with Diana's time between leaving home and marrying Charles are insightful for that understanding. They helped me understand how this tabula rasa, this completely unformed individual reacted inside the Firm.

If anyone or anything comes off badly, it is the institution of the monarchy, not merely a political anachronism but a world into which no modern girl could enter without self-immolation.

Fascinating inside look into the 20th Century's Great Soap Opera


Always was absorbed by the ongoing tragedy of Diana, and alway interested in the Royals, and in British history. Diana, and now her sons, are just the latest in the story line which starts when a bastard Knight from Normandy conquered England and changed his name from Guillaume Le Batard (the Bastard) to William the Conqueror. Anyway...his direct descendents include both Charles and Diana. She was fond of telling Charles AND his father she had more royal blood and an older title (that of the Spencers)than Charles had. Not so shy!! From this book and others I've read it seems clear that if the royal SOB Charles could have been honest with himself, his parents, & the Royal apparatus, he would never have married Diana, who was married solely as a virgin brood mare. She would have had a chance at happiness, so would have he. The marriage was doomed from the start as he had no intention of ever giving up his mistress, the married mother of 3 or 4, Camilla Parker-Bowles (whose husband was the occasional lover of Princess Anne-- all in the family...) For a young 18- 19 yr old girl, very romantic, who always lived in a fantasy world, apparently, she had no clue until the honeymoon of Charles' other life... Then, and from then on, it was a battle to the death, literally. Tina Brown insists Diana never stopped trying to win Charles' love. I don't know what she bases this on, there is no proof, and once Diana had "done her duty" and produced two children, she had affair after affair, as Charles did, as well as his long lasting affair, almost a marriage, with Camilla. It was an accepted thing in their cynical social circle, but how well the eternal romantic child Diana coped with all that is one of the questions. She appears to have wanted to be in love and be loved, not just to have lovers.

Brown does do a good job explaining how the seeds of Diana's death were planted when she fired the palace guards after her death, feeling they spied on her. That left her unprotected except by such "guards" as people like Dodi Fayed hired. He appears to be a playboy, not much more than the male equivilent of "cute and dumb" but very rich, so he could protect her and take her away from the constant the harrassment of London. The accident definitely seems to have been caused by an equal combination of driver Henri Paul's drunkeness, and the aggressive paparrazzi, ( and any of us who have ever paid for a tabloid or any shiny photo-mag with pics of her or any celebrity are feeding into that machine and I myself feel guilt over it.) The book does describe very well and in a sickening way the lengths they would go to to get photographs or certain facial expressions from their "prey". They mobbed after she took her sons to the movie "Jurassic Park", trying to be a normal family, and the photographers used such methods as calling her "c..t" and other words of the sort to get her attention and her head up. When she yelled back at them their headline was that she was a "Loon". This was the atmosphere she and Dodi were fleeing from in Aug '97. The tabloid publishers were said to be ecstatic that the chauffers' (Henri Paul's ) blood level for alcohol and pills was several times over the legal limit. They then happily printed headlines that he alone was to blame, and some momentum building up in Britain to curtail the paparazzi's aggressive activities was stopped in its' tracks.

After her death, the most interesting chapter in the book was the chapter on how the Royal family handled the death. I've seen the movie "The Queen" and enjoyed it, but it is startlingly untrue to the tone of the Royal Family's rationale for staying out of London. It seems the director made sure to show the Queen and Prince Phillip and Prince Charles as emotionally cold and distant, among themselves, and the boys are never shown and barely mentioned. The Queen and Prince Phillip are seen as cold, emotionless, out of touch people. The chapter in the back of the book talks about how the family as a whole rallied around the young boys who had lost their mother, although the family as a whole had learned to dislike her due to her Andrew Morton book and TV interviews. Prince Charles pulled out old photo albums and went though them with the boys; Princess Anne his sister brought her 20 yr old son and 16 yr old daughter to Balmoral to keep the boys' company, and everyone was involved in horseback riding, hiking, hunting, all the outdoorsy things the family enjoys, and also to "wear out" the young teens so they didn't have time to dwell on threir loss. Not necessarily what every family might have done, but one way to show love and concern. Princess Anne apparently took young 12 yr old Harry under her wing and spent much time with him at that time, hiking and walking and riding with him, as he was clearly bereft. The Queen, rightly or wrongly, ordered all TV's and radios removed from Balmoral except her own, so the boys would not be deluged with the maudlin broadcasts around the clock. Prince Phillip, their grandfather, was particularly affectionate in a "gruff, tender" way; it seems William was the son he'd always wished he'd had. At one point during funeral arrangements, (and as shown in the movie it is true Tony Blair played a huge part in convincing the Queen of the importance of the State Funeral), the negotiations were going on via intercom between London and Balmoral. The London people thought they were speaking to an official. Suddenly Prince Phillip "boomed" over the intercom : "These boys... have lost their mother! You're talking about them as if they are commodities" and his "voice was full of emotion, a true voice of the grandfather speaking." Another time he broke in on the conference and said: "Our worry at the moment is William, he's run away up the hill and we can't find him. Thats the only thing we are concerned with at the moment." These were things, along with some others, that totally changed my view of Prince Phillip from other books and stories I have read. Of course, people are multi-faceted, and clearly he is a human being, not just the gruff old man who walks two steps behind the Queen.

It was Prince Phillip who also talked the boys into walking behind the casket along road to the Cathedral in honor of their mother. Willliam didn't want to and was in tears. Prince Phillip reportedly said: "If I walk, will you walk with me?" All along the route, he kept up a soft stream of talk to the boys, discussing all the landmarks they were passing as they walked. A moving moment for all of us, and a tough moment for any father or grandfather. (It is interesting to me that Phillip did this, not Charles, their father, or Earl Spencer, their uncle.)

All of this was left out of "The Queen" however, I suppose too much humanity in the Royals is non-PC.

On major complaint is the lack of photographs. It seemed very cheap on the part of the book's editors, considering the book's cost.

Overall, a tough read if you cared about Diana, it does show her warts and all. It gave me a higher opinion of Prince Phillip than from anything I've ever read, and great sympathy for William and Harry who are already being treated as their mother was by the out-of-control press and the public who has learned nothing and keeps buying the same trash that essentially killed Diana; and I hope I'm wrong, but I hope they can survive their version of it.