In the early hours of 31 August 1997, a spirited, compassionate and beautiful woman, who just happened to be the most famous woman in the world, met her death in a tunnel under the streets of Paris, hunted down by her pursuers. This biography examines how such a thing could come to pass.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Of all the books that emerged from the death of Princess Diana, this is the most intensely personal. If historians want to understand the depth of feeling--mourning, sentimental self-identification, feminist and republican and class rage--that overtook large parts of Britain for several weeks after her death, they could do worse than look here. What sometimes count for faults in Burchill's writing--failures of logic, overstatement, the pursuit of the smart-ass remark at the expense of overall control--are her ways of saying what someone needed to say, or expressions of a person transfixed by deep emotion. Burchill sees Diana as a woman betrayed by a using and adulterous husband and distorted from childhood by the false values and iniquity of a class, who grew into a person of real compassion and social usefulness, escaping self-destructive urges and eating disorders to settle into a mature sensuality. The randomness of the car crash in a Paris underpass is seen as all the more terrible because it cut short the productive personal development for the princess. This is not the only possible reading of the facts in the case, but it is a coherent one, memorably expressed. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
'Burchill fans, of whom this reviewer is unashamedly one, will find her triumphantly on form in this book.' -- A.N. WILSON
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Different,
By A Customer
This review is from: Diana (Diana Princess of Wales) (Hardcover)
This book was different from any othe Diana book I've ever read and I thoroughly enjoyed it. The author had some very good insights and some hilariously wicked comments on the royal family. She attacks the English upper classes and reveal them to be an outdated establishment that cause problems with their children. Diana was a victim of this. May she rest in peace.
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
YIKES!!!,
By A Customer
This review is from: Diana (Diana Princess of Wales) (Hardcover)
Um...well, I finally finished this "different" book on the beloved Princess of Wales. Finally is the word to be used as I found this book to be a hard read. The author seems so full of anger and hatred that is barely disgused in her work. This woman's words are so biting and harsh! Yes, the way Diana was treated at the hands of her in-laws was at best dispicable, but for the love of Mike, every chapter and seemingly every page was sprinkled in this style of writing. I have tons of books on the subject, purchased way back in July of l981 up to the one that came in today's mail and I have to say that this was the least enjoyable one I've ever picked up. I see by other reviews written that I am in the minority here, but I have to call them as I see them! Plus there were many errors, dress designers were incorrect, pictures labeled wrong, timelines a little off. Nit-picky? Maybe, but I'm a believer in knowing your subject matter of which you write.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Feminist Defender of Diana against the House of Windsor,
By
This review is from: Diana (Diana Princess of Wales) (Hardcover)
This book is partly a biography of Diana's life, with some color photographs, but mostly a commentary upon Diana's life in the context of the House of Windsor. The author is sympathetic to Diana's plight as an innocent girl who married for love, but found out too late that Prince Charles would not give up his mistress Camilla. The author severely castigates Prince Charles and Camilla, and the Queen and the entire House of Windsor, as callous hypocrites and morally bankrupt pretenders to the throne and the Church of England. The author concedes that Diana had some problems and weaknesses of her own, but overwhelmingly takes the side of Diana against the House of Windsor, and scathingly considers Prince Charles to be a third-rate character unworthy to be king. The author has a great way with words, sometimes angry, sometimes mocking, and sometimes wickedly funny, with a few obscenities interspersed, in her attacks upon Prince Charles and Camilla, and the House of Windsor, although sometimes written in a subtle way that would probably only be understood by someone very familiar with Diana's life and British history of the past twenty years. If the reader has a similar love for Diana, and a similar very low opinion of Prince Charles and Camilla and the House of Windsor, the book would probably be enjoyable to the reader.
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