Press

What the critics say

A fresh portrait of Princess Diana and the impact she had on a generation
- Newsweek

Intensely well researched and an un-put-down-able read, Tina Brown's extraordinary book parts the brocaded velvet , lifts the expensive net curtains and allows us an unprecedented look at the world and mind of the most famous person on the planet. It is a tragi-comedy, a soap opera, a social commentary, a historical document and a psychological examination, written by a superb investigative journalist.
- Academy Award Winning Actress, Helen Mirren

Every previous Dianologist must now take a back seat. Tina Brown's The Diana Chronicles is not a book on Diana. It is the book. It conveys better than anything I have ever read, the basic intelligence of its subject. The truly impressive thing about the book is its wisdom. It is full of good mots. It is a master. Ruthless, relentlessly inquisitive, it made me cheer to the rafters.
- A.N. Wilson, Sunday Times

The Diana Chronicles is a blockbuster: a rollicking, page-turning, fast quipping, gripping romp of a read. It is the work of a seasoned, serious journalist who understands that just because a subject has a populist appeal does not mean that it has to get the dumb treatment.
- The Times

Authoratative and well researched, Tina Brown's book should become standard reading material about the People's Princess
- Tatler

The Diana Chronicles is an enjoyable romp. There are funny moments and Brown in an astute observer of people.Tina Brown is the biographer the princess deserves.
- Sunday Telegraph

Tina Brown makes Diana as deeply fascinating as the great heroines of literature. She is magnificent at creating atmosphere
- Daily Express

Nothing comes close to Tina Brown's book for its tight grip on the dark human comedy that was Diana's life and death. Brown knows the ritual dances, the shouts and whispers of the tribes of Britain - the Sloanes, the paparazzi, the aristos, and the cocktail lounge lizards - better than anyone who has ever written this story but she also has a perfect ear for the way ordinary people responded to the doomed Princess. The result is compulsively page-turning
- Simon Schama

Ms. Brown is in an ideal position to sort out fact from factoid. She casts a sophisticated and skeptical eye over the reams of nonsense which have smothered the Diana myth. Her sophisticated approach, a triumph of reporting, makes The Diana Chronicles a candy feast of royal gossip to be consumed preferably at a single sitting. It will bring the summer to a standstill. Every last quip and quote, snip and sneer, joke and jape about this disastrous marriage is recorded with elegance and interpreted with wise understanding
- The New York Sun

It's [The Diana Chronicles] Brown's plugged-in perspective on a familiar saga, applying her considerable reporting and writing skills to the story of the short life and long death of the most famous and famously mourned British princess ever
- USA Today

This celebrated editor, mover and shaker brings her own sort of privilege to the realm of aristocratic fairy tales. She knows this world much better than many who inhabit it. A calm, credible, quietly shattering view of life inside the royal hothouse
- The New York Times

Tina Brown has produced something that is, as well as absorbing and stirring, witty and penetrating. Everybody knows that Tina comprehends the world of charisma, but here she proves that she understands how 'fairy tale' can also mean the Brothers Grimm.
- Christopher Hitchens

There has never been a biography of Princess Diana like this one-honest, unsparing, witty, elegant, crammed with delicious gossip and detail, and yet withal fiercely sympathetic, and not only towards poor Diana. I read Tina Brown's book non-stop, filled with admiration for her crisp style, her deep understanding of human nature, and her ability to convince the reader that the Diana she knew and writes about is the real thing, not the usual invention of journalists and pseudo-biographers. This is not only first-rate biography, but a marvelous social history, and a bitingly accurate portrait of the English upper classes, the like of which I haven't read since the publication of the glorious letters of Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh to each other-and how they would have loved every word of this!
- Michael Korda, author of Charmed Lives and Ike

Tina Brown has produced a delightfully smart and insightful book that captures both the personal tale of Princess Diana as well as the astonishing cultural phenomenon that she became. Nobody has a better feel for both aspects than Tina. With great reporting and savvy judgments, she weaves a compelling human drama into a rich social history
- Walter Isaacson, president of the Aspen Institute and author of Einstein:

This book is the closest I'll ever get to knowing Diana. The Diana Chronicles has enough of Diana's hairpin personality turns, emotional drops and gleeful summits to be a Disneyland thrill ride
- LA Times

Brown's book is different-at once more intimate. It's clear that Brown has discovered, for herself and for us, the woman.
- Newsweek

She writes with the feline flair of a woman who has met, but not necessarily liked, most of the characters in her book and who has an uncommonly good way with characterization. The book's greatest attraction, however, is its sheer wealth of detail, by turns salacious, vinegary, depressing and hilarious.
- Wall Street Journal

Jam-packed, juicy it includes shovelfuls of hot fresh dirt. A great glory of this book is the behind-the scenes close-ups of life at the various castles, palaces and Stately Homes. A walloping good read.
- Washington Post Review

The Diana Chronicles has authenticity
- Lorraine Kelly, the Sun

Empathetic. Brown displays understanding for almost every character's predicament in the whole tragic mess.
- Scotland on Sunday

Brown breathes new life into the saga of this royal 'icon of blondeness' by revealing just how powerful, and how marketable, her story became in the age of modern celebrity journalism.
- The New York Times

This book is an unputdownable pageturner, packed with facts, extensive research, copious interviews, intrigue, refined minutiae an historical accuracy. Riveting. Tina Brown is really qualified to stand and deliver, and she leaves no stone unturned.Tina Brown reminds us of the way we were and what we have subsequently become.
- Spectator

A fresh and vividly perceptive portrait. The Diana Chronicles is remarkable: for a keen analytical intelligence, for wit as well as compassion, and for an unusually dextrous handling of the language, with an authorial voice both confident and compelling. Tina Brown has a highly refined demotic, a sophisticated form of glossy magazine-speak woven into a muscular and elegant prose. With perfect pitch for the fall of a sentence, she takes a glitzy, slangy English and shapes it into something entirely of her own, an original tool wielded with skill and daring.
- Times Literary Supplement

Popular subject deftly handled. A guilty pleasure
- The Observer

An undeniably entertaining read
- The Week

Brown paints witty vignettes.This chronicle is a hugely enjoyable read, packed with bed-hopping, drama and tragedy.
- Irish Independent

Intriguing. It reads like a powerful novel
- Bella

[Tina Brown] is magnificent at creating atmosphere
- International Express

Brown's great contribution to our understanding of the tragic end of the Princess of Wales depends on her knowledge of what's what in a world the rest of us can only gawp at.
- London Review of Books

The Diana Chronicles by Tina Brown is compelling
- Irish Sunday Independent

A summer spell-binder for serious people. Its pleasures are owed to more than its sensational subject. They come also from seeing a fine mind take a severley limited theme and create out of it an acutely observed portrait of manners and mores, love and folly. It is a superb cultural history of the transformation of the British upper classes in the last quarter of the last century.
- The New Republic