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It's hard to imagine any revelation that would alter the shape of this sad narrative, which has been told overexcitedly (by, for one, Paul Burrell, Diana's butler, in "The Way We Were"--emetic book, emetic title) and soberly (by Sarah Bradford, in her serious and balanced 2006 biography, "Diana"). But the best book on Diana is the newest, "The Diana Chronicles" (Doubleday; $27.50), by Tina Brown. She is well qualified to tell this story, since it was Brown who wrote the Vanity Fair piece that first exposed the trouble in the Waleses' marriage, back in 1985.
We don't question the motives of reviewer John Lanchester, a brilliant essayist and author in his own right (the review itself is a knowing exegesis of the Diana story as a class conflict), but still, the blink-and-you-miss-it disclosure is a little off-putting: Brown was the editor of Tatler, "the house magazine for the upper classes," as she calls it, from 1979 to 1983, when Diana burst onto the scene and married Charles; she was the editor of Vanity Fair from 1984 to 1992, when Diana was busy becoming the most famous woman in the world; she was the editor of this magazine at the time of Diana's death.
Tina Brown, eh? Sounds familiar? Ah, yes, she used to work here! The Naked and the Dead [NYer]
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