Thanks to her excellent contacts, and the wealth of writing on Diana that has come before, Tina Brown (former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker) has assembled her biography of the princess. Neither an academic study nor a personal memoir, this account is apparently privileged by Brown’s own perspective. But although we are told that Brown and Diana had met, clearly this meeting was not substantial enough to be dwelt on in the book.
Instead, Brown focuses on Diana’s media identity – from her emergence as a Sloaney royal fiancée, to her death as a millionaire-dating Mother Teresa. Strangely, in this biography of a woman for whom every picture told a story, we have no accompanying photos.
At intimate moments when the facts become hazy, Brown is happy to offer her own informed opinion, or imagine her own scene. It’s an author’s prerogative, but sometimes it seems a little forced. The cinematic treatment is emphasised by the vocabulary: we get the odd “Whoomph” to emphasise a strong moment, or sometimes a “Huh?” to prefigure an Oprah-style line of querying. It’s a book for the talk-show generation: big on revelations, but ironically low on true, human intimacy. Apt, perhaps, for the princess, but not flatteringly so.
