Standard, which flies from the flagpole of Buckingham Palace when the queen is in residence, bears “lyres and lions rampant.” She makes a number of other errors about precedence and nomenclature. In other words, she is very much a consumer, high-life Di rather than a traditionalist Charles. Indeed, when theDaily Mail (London) started publishing extracts from Brown’s book, transposed on the front page were remarkably similar photographs of biographer and subject (October 1, 2007), both with short blond hair, both wearing a black dress. Here, then, is the portrait of one media-savvy icon by another. “An aristocrat herself,” observes Brown, “Diana knew that the aristocracy of birth was now irrelevant. All that counted now was the aristocracy of exposure.”

Thus, the strength of this book lies in its understanding of the centrality of celebrity in today’s world. Lady Diana Spencer, a deeply wounded product of divorce, thought that a prince could provide unconditional healing love and security, as happens in the novels she read. When this adolescent dream seemed to be coming true, when Diana first began to appear in the newspapers, she read omnivorously what was written about her. She learned to know individual journalists and even found out where they lived. She was, as Brown acutely points out, in intellect and in emotional need at one with the audience of the British tabloid press. Brown understands Diana’s needs as Diana understood those of the tabloid readers. Later, when Charles’s jealousy of her crowd-pleasing power and her jealousy of his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles, began to create a toxic mixture, Diana would use her celebrity rank as a weapon against her husband and his family. Her beauty and genuine compassion for the unfortunate and the suffering, a compassion she knew how to project, conquered all. What did it matter that the queen had stoically done what she saw as her duty for forty years? What did it matter that the radically imperfect Prince of Wales yet did his best in his difficult position? Diana looked good on the front page of The Sun.

Apparently without irony, Brown reports that “the Princess ran her schedule of public appearances like a brisk CEO whose distinctive marketing concept is the personal touch.” She “paved the way for big-tent humanitarians like Bono, Angelina Jolie, Madonna, and George Clooney,” who also want to be taken as sincere even if they are pretty. She came to understand the power of the combination of old-fashioned “royal bounty” and “the new electronic system of worldwide media” in a world in which the monarchy’s political power is effectively defunct. When during Diana’s campaign against land mines some journalists had not got the shots they wanted after her first walk through a partly cleared minefield, she did the walk a second time. For Brown, “This second walk was Diana’s purest synthesis of courage, calculation, and brilliantly directed media power.”

Brown has no problem with the world she describes, in which glamorous appearance, even if backed up with occasional courage, triumphs over dull worth. In fact, she seems rather pleased about the change. According to her, “Diana instinctively seemed to know that the only power royalty has left is the power to disappoint, and she never did, either in her physical presence or in her responsiveness to human detail.” Gone is the Windsors’ idea that public appearances are acts of state to which any incidental televisual charisma the actor may possess is irrelevant. After Diana’s death, the Royal Family catastrophically misjudged the British public’s need, or at least desire, for public grief, a grief that must visibly include the queen, her husband, and her children in its public expression. “Diana had schooled them to expect inclusion,” and “the British people were no longer willing to be excluded from the zone of privacy claimed by a family whose purpose, after all, was to symbolize the nation.” Most lamentably of all, according to Brown, “The Queen did not grasp that in the media era communication is at least as much a core value as stoicism.” When Brown asked British prime minister Tony Blair what Diana’s life had meant, his response was that “Diana taught us a new way to be British.” Whether the new way is a better way is debatable.

Brown’s style is well suited to her subject. Here is women’s magazine prose (“Diana’s craving to make something pure out of the tarnishing was the essence of her mystery and the source of her inspiration”); hollowly resounding popular psychology (“In a bloodless world, perhaps she wanted to see the color of her own blood”regarding her cutting herself); knowing, if opaque, journalese (“The social atmosphere in fashionable circles was a more mercantile, gayer, harder-edged edition of swinging London with a more aggressively high-low affect [and a drug regimen that favored cocaine over cannabis]”); and inevitably here are self-indulgent references to all-important popular culture (“The Dynasty Di construct reflected the exact opposite of Diana’s self-view at the time . All she knew was that the Grand Sloane act had to go. It just encouraged acts of repression from a royal machine that took her comme il faut outfits to mean capitulation.”). To the eventual fatigue of one reader, this relentless perkiness is kept up for nearly five hundred pages.

The book was widely and mostly favorably reviewed. A. N. Wilson, writing in the Sunday Times, was rhapsodic: “Not a book on Diana. It is the book. Not only does it put the story of Diana in its proper historical context of British politics, journalism and the changing mores of the past quarter century, but it is a perfect example of the nosy-parker’s art . It is a masterpiece.” Sarah Vine of The Times (London) now understood “the torrent of hysteria that followed the Princess’s sad death.” Caroline Weber in The New York Times praised “an insightful, absorbing account of the pas de deux into which, to her eventual peril, Diana joined with the paparazzi.” Tunku Varadarajan in The Wall Street Journal lauded Brown as a writer: “In her hands, a trashy (if delicious) tale is rendered vividly mordant . [She has] an uncommonly good way with characterization.”