Private Di

Diana was not above embellishing aspects of her life, especially those that reflected badly on her husband of 15 years, Prince Charles, the current heir to the throne. Brown concludes that the Prince of Wales was in love with Diana when they married in 1981, and she with him. Indeed, she had set her sights on Charles long before he noticed her. For all the supposed importance of the 20-year-old bride's virginity, they did have at least one assignation and probably slept together before the wedding—in a royal railroad car. Later, Diana did not try to throw herself down the stairs to commit suicide, as she told interviewers, but merely slipped. Her most notorious affair, with Hewitt, probably did not begin until 1986, and therefore Hewitt probably is not, as often rumored, the "real" father of Diana's younger son, Prince Harry, born in 1984. (On this one critical point of parentage, curiously, Brown seems a little unsure.)

The picture of the royals that emerges from the book is of people who are boringly dutiful in their public lives, more than a little randy in private and often easily manipulated. Prince Charles appears both sympathetic and sad while he's being worked over not only by Diana but by his longtime mistress and present wife, Camilla Parker Bowles née Shand, the Duchess of Cornwall. As Brown explodes some trivial myths about this royal triangle—Charles, who was dressed by his butler, probably did not intend to wear cuff links from Camilla while on his honeymoon with Diana, and he did not sleep with Camilla on the eve of his wedding—the author's deeper reporting and analysis make their soap opera a riveting study in personalities as well as institutions.

Brown concludes that Camilla's real love was in fact her first husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, despite their more-or-less open marriage and their eventual divorce. In an aristocratic milieu where being a royal mistress is recognized as a vocation, Camilla was very good at her job, flattering Charles, and even asking him to read his speeches to her over the phone.

So, too, Diana learned to be calculating, and never more so than during that summer that she died, just a year after her divorce from Charles became final. She was by then mature, radiant, independent, "transformed from protected royal princess into free-floating global celebrity," as Brown writes. But she was also, as the country-music song has it, looking for love in all the wrong places. Brown concludes her first affair was with Barry Mannakee, her bodyguard from 1985, who was later killed in a motorcycle accident. Next was Hewitt, whose relationship with Diana initially had the tacit approval of the royals, Brown writes. Afterward came James Gilbey, related to the gin fortune, who was caught calling Diana "Squidgy" in a bugged phone conversation; art dealer Oliver Hoare (whom she harassed with anonymous phone calls); rugby player Will Carling (whose wife named Diana in divorce proceedings); surgeon Hasnat Khan, the love of her life who would not marry her because of his obligations to his Muslim family and to his profession, and Dodi Fayed, son of Harrods owner Mohamed Al Fayed, who was just a bit of post divorce summer entertainment.

By then, Diana was, as great modern celebrities often are, in the process of reinventing herself. She cut back her charity commitments from about 100 to half a dozen, including the National AIDS Trust. (The way she had touched and comforted AIDS patients in the 1980s had an enormous impact, breaking through the paranoid walls of prejudice among the public.) But the princess was much stronger on symbolism than substance. "Diana couldn't cope with long, detail-oriented briefings on the Rwandan refugee problem," writes Brown. "In committee meetings she had the attention span of a fruit fly." A friend guided her toward the Halo Trust, a group working to clear land mines in war zones around the world. Partly out of conviction and partly to impress her lover, Dr. Hasnat Khan, she took up the mission—and once again changed perceptions for the better. Some of the most enduring images of Diana on the public record are with the maimed children of Angola and wearing mine-clearance armor in the killing fields of Bosnia.

Yet at the same time, Diana was ditching some of her longtime friends and allies. She was especially unkind to Sarah Ferguson, her former sister-in-law who had been married to Charles's younger brother Prince Andrew, once tipping off photographers about a dalliance "Fergie" was having. The two women forged a new alliance during their divorces, but when the impecunious Ferguson alleged in an otherwise saccharine autobiography that she had caught a plantar wart from a pair of Diana's shoes she borrowed, Diana cut her off for good.