The Mercedes driven by Henri Paul in which Princess Diana, Dodi Al Fayed and Trevor Rees-Jones were travelling crashes into a pillar in the Alma tunnel in the centre of Paris, killing Paul, Dodi and Diana and seriously injuring Rees Jones.
*20th anniversary edition featuring a new afterword*Glamour. Duty. Tragedy: The Woman Behind the Princess. Sarah Bradford delivers an authoritative and explosive study of the greatest icon of the twentieth century: Diana.After more than a decade interviewing those closest to the Princess and her select circle, Sarah Bradford exposes the real Diana: the blighted childhood, the old-fashioned courtship which saw her capture the Prince of Wales, the damage caused by the spectre of Camilla Parker Bowles, through to the collapse of the royal marriage and Diana's final and complicated year as single woman. Diana paints an honest portrait of a woman riddled with contradictions and whose vulnerability and unique empathy with the suffering made her one of the most extraordinary figures of the modern age.
This is an account of the Princess of Wales's formative years told by Mary Clarke - her confidante, friend and former nanny. Diana, bewildered by her parents' recent divorce, had already locked one former nanny in the bathroom when Clarke arrived to take up her post with the Spencer family. But Diana took to her new nanny and Mary became like a second mother to her. Many of the keys to the Princess's personality are locked in the memories of Clarke: her home and school life, her eating habits, family relationships, childhood daydreams, pleasures and miseries are recalled and explained.
The life of Diana, Princess of Wales, has never before been told with such insight and authority. This book is a subtle, honest portrait, without the bias and exaggeration of the past. Drawing on new research and dozens of specially commissoned interviews - many with senior members of the royal household who have never spoken before - DIANA:STORY OF A PRINCESS explains how a shy teenager grew up to be the most talked-about woman in the world, and why she later became such a vigorous critic of the Royal Family.DIANA: STORY OF A PRINCESS is a tale of chicanery at the highest level, revealing in gripping detail how the Princess and her husband sought to influence how their failing marriage, and indeed their entire lives, were perceived by the outside world.
Beautiful, resourceful, treacherous, vulnerable. She was a woman full of contradictions and he would never stop loving her. As a young girl Diana is irrepressible, untameable and, to the orphaned John, endlessly fascinating. Only daughter of a wealthy businessman, she is drawn both to a rigorous outdoor life in the west country with her horses and the glittering London society that will be her destiny. They spend a magical unconventional childhood together but Diana's ambition, her passion for life that makes her so desirable, pulls her away from all that makes her happy. The fierce friendship that grew inevitably to love, develops as inevitably to conflict and a betrayal that will mark them both - until the trials of war offers them redemption.
This is the unusual and compelling story of Diana, a tantalizingly beautiful woman who sought love in the strange by-paths of Lesbos. Fearless and outspoken, it dares to reveal that hidden world where perfumed caresses and half-whispered endearments constitute the forbidden fruits in a Garden of Eden where men are never accepted. This is how Diana: A Strange Autobiography was described when it was published in paperback in 1952. The original 1939 hardcover edition carried with it a Publisher's Note: This is the autobiography of a woman who tried to be normal. In the book, Diana is presented as the unexceptional daughter of an unexceptional plutocratic family. During adolescence, she finds herself drawn with mysterious intensity to a girl friend. The narrative follows Diana's progress through college; a trial marriage that proves she is incapable of heterosexuality; intellectual and sexual education in Europe; and a series of lesbian relationships culminating in a final tormented triangular struggle with two other women for the individual salvation to be found in a happy couple. In her introduction, Julie Abraham argues that Diana is not really an autobiography at all, but a deliberate synthesis of different archetypes of this confessional genre, echoing, as it does, more than a half-dozen novels. Hitting all the high and low points of the lesbian novel, the book, Abraham illustrates, offers a defense of lesbian relationships that was unprecedented in 1939 and radical for decades afterwards.
