Diana (Diana Princess of Wales)

Burchill, Julie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0752825895 ISBN 13: 9780752825892

Publisher: Gollancz, 1999

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.

Review:

Of all the books that came out of the death of Princess Diana, this is perhaps the most enduring, because 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, they could do vastly 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 here either ways of saying what someone needed to say, or expressions of a whole person transfixed by deep emotion. She 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 won through to a real compassion and social usefulness, and who escaped self-destructive urges and eating disorders to settle into a mature sensuality. The death in a Paris underpass is seen as all the more terrible because random, gratuitous and the cutting short of productive personal development. This is not the only possible reading of the facts in the case, but it is a coherent one, memorably expressed. --Roz Kaveney

About the Author:

Born in Bristol in 1959, Julie Burchill is known for her controversial and acerbic style of journalism. At seventeen, she went to work for the New Musical Express, at nineteen The Face, at twenty-four The Sunday Times. She has written for many magazines and national newspapers and is the author of eight previous books.