Familiar but fascinating

Princess Diana was two years my junior and eight years younger than her most recent biographer Tina Brown. Our collective generation was one in search of someone or something to provide the soundtrack to our lives. We hadn’t lived through the second world war, we were too young to have connected with Vietnam or fallen for Kennedy, Sinatra was already old and our own royal family appeared atrophied, boringly embalmed in pomp and circumstance.

We were Thatcher’s kids, who may well have been raised on a gentle diet of Mallory Towers and Jackie magazine but we were also seduced by punk and possibilities and ready for a seismic change. It was the dawn of a much racier media age. Diana’s fairytale marriage to Prince Charles in 1981 suddenly gave our generation a benchmark. She was the perfect embodiment of the spirit of the age, quickly becoming the poster girl for a hitherto unrecognised, rare and rather un-British phenomenon: that of emotional intelligence.

Tina Brown is the right age, comes from the right background and is perfectly positioned to recognise and accurately report on the overwhelming and often underrated cultural impact of this. Having moved to America to edit Vanity Fair in 1984 she is able to stand back and observe Diana’s meteoric rise from super-Sloane to global super-star with a healthily distanced yet intimate and analytical perception.

In choosing to write The Diana Chronicles Brown has given herself an extremely hard subject to shed any new light on, simply because her readers are obviously over-familiar with the plot. We are aware of the beginning, know much of the middle and will never forget the horror of the tragic end. Brown appears sensibly to have approached writing the book as though it were a gigantic, in-depth Vanity Fair feature, and I mean that as a compliment.