Filled with insider anecdotes and gleeful accounts of the Royal family’s dysfunction (spending every August in the freezing outpost of Balmoral for a start), it’s also the desperately sad tale of a young woman who wanted family love and support only to be left disillusioned and isolated but (thankfully) found great solace in her children.

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 It is a tragi-comedy, a soap opera, a social commentary, a historical document and a psychological examination, written by a superb investigative journalist.

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.

One of the most well-researched insider books on Diana’s life . . . Essential reading for anyone interested in how she became the people’s princess, and the battles she endured to ensure her legacy.

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.