Generally when I’m reviewing a book on a subject I’ve written about, I turn to the index as soon as I’m bored to see if I’m quoted, so I can skip to the scintillating bits. No need to, here; I rock up in the very first paragraph of the introduction: “Of the various titles that Diana Spencer collected during her life, it is the unofficial one of ‘the People’s Princess’ that has most come to encapsulate her reputation. The origins of the term are contested. Many have claimed that Tony Blair’s spin doctor, the shrewd, calculating Alastair Campbell, invented it. Others have said it derived from Anthony Holden, a royal biographer and translator of ancient Greek poetry and Italian opera. Julie Burchill, a republican iconoclast perhaps best known for her writing about pop music, asserts that it was in fact she who bestowed the title upon Diana in a laudatory article about the princess published in 1992.”
No one should be expected to be sensible when they’re in the grip of passion and when I occasionally peep inside my 1998 book Diana (pre-loved £2.50 to £75.88 on Amazon — isn’t wishful thinking a wonderful thing?) I get a slightly shocked thrill. Such a whole-heartedly fan-girl tome is it that once, when challenged about it in an interview, I claimed to have been possessed by the spirit of a really bad writer! Here, Edward White calls it “One of the strangest books ever written about Diana, but also one of the most enlightening: it reveals a strain of thought that hums in the background of so much coverage of Diana but is rarely articulated so explicitly or entertainingly.”
