Diana - Hardcover

Burchill, Julie

3.7

56 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 029782418X ISBN 13: 9780297824183

Publisher: Orion Publishing, 1998

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In the early hours of August 31, 1997, a spirited, compassionate, and beautiful woman—who just happened to be the most famous woman in the world—was killed in a tunnel under the streets of Paris, hunted down by her pursuers. How did this happen? In this book—part love story, part document of our times, part murder mystery—Julie Burchill explores every aspect of the "Age of Diana" to develop the first rounded, in-depth look at this iconic figure of our century.

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Review:

Of all the books that emerged from the death of Princess Diana, this is 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 after her death, they could do 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 her ways of saying what someone needed to say, or expressions of a person transfixed by deep emotion. Burchill 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 grew into a person of real compassion and social usefulness, escaping self-destructive urges and eating disorders to settle into a mature sensuality. The randomness of the car crash in a Paris underpass is seen as all the more terrible because it cut short the productive personal development for the princess. This is not the only possible reading of the facts in the case, but it is a coherent one, memorably expressed. --Roz Kaveney, Amazon.co.uk

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.

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