Tina Brown’s diana book. That’s it. That’s the link.
So for “Thanksgiving break” I gave myself permission to get irredeemably obsessed with one of the two buzzy queen-adjacent Netflix shows, and I ended up choosing Season 4 of The Crown over The Queen’s Gambit solely based on the fact that my old roommate had passed down to me a copy of Tina Brown’s 2007 book, The Diana Chronicles, earlier this year, and I was like okay well I’ll make it a whole theme week ha ha. (This is where I am mentally, pandemically).
And you GUYS. I am in so deep now as a third-wave Diana junkie — not just from the show, but also from this fucking insane fever dream of a book that I honestly cannot believe exists, especially knowing now, in the Post-Markle Escape Era, how controlling and media-savvy the royal family can be. Once I got to the part about Charles and Camilla’s early relationship, I had to put this book down and literally google Tina Brown to make sure she hasn’t somehow been mysteriously disappeared by MI6 or some shit in the decade since this book just totally laid out all their dirty laundry.
Like it is so simultaneously juicy and dense that I was like, um is this legal? It is so sharp that I flinched several times in sympathy for these random old rich white people I’ve never cared about before. And it is so well-sourced that I feel like, one third of the way through, I already have an honorary degree in Windsor Studies. Overall, I felt like I need therapy after reading this.
So, TL;DR, If you also want to parachute in on the Diana season with little to no prior knowledge of the British monarchy, I say don’t even bother with the earlier seasons or straining your eyes for a few hours on Wikipedia. Just get ahold of this book. If you’re still not convinced, this beautiful sampler platter of a piece from The Toast (man, fucking RIP), Lines From Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles That Made Me Lose My Entire Jaw, should finish the job.
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I cannot recommend enough to you to listen to the podcast "You're Wrong About" and the Deep Dive episodes they do on Diana... :)