Charles Spencer's memoir about his sister arrives with the force of a long-delayed argument finally spoken aloud — and with many of the same problems. The book is two things at once: a tender, occasionally illuminating portrait of Diana before the machine got to her, and an exhausting chronicle of Spencer's wounds, real and imagined, sustained over six decades of aristocratic family life. The two strands do not reconcile. The grief is genuine; the grievances are relentless; and the reader is left to navigate between them without a guide. The most striking editorial decision Spencer made was serialising the book in the Daily Mail — the same newspaper whose tabloid culture he indirectly condemns by describing such journalists as inhabiting 'the murky swamps of malevolence.' Whether this is hypocrisy, pragmatism, or simply the kind of cognitive compartmentalisation the aristocracy has always excelled at is left as an exercise for the reader. The book's lead revelation — that King Charles told Spencer shortly after Diana's death, 'Rest assured, we'll forget her soon enough' — lands differently depending on whether you notice that 'hissed' is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Where Spencer is genuinely good, he is very good. His portrait of their mother Frances is the most useful corrective in the book: a spirited, mildly eccentric woman who comes across as the source of Diana's gifts and who has been publicly underrated in the decades of retrospective mythology. His account of the royal family's behaviour in the days after Diana's death — the deafness, the rigidity, the sheer institutional inability to respond to the nation's mood — is vivid and credible. And his telling of the logistical and emotional horror of the funeral itself, including the near-collapse of the pall-bearers under a reinforced lead-lined coffin and the argument over where Charles should walk, is the kind of granular insider detail that justifies a memoir. But Spencer cannot resist himself. The speech he gave at Diana's funeral — and it was, genuinely, a remarkable speech — gets relitigated chapter by chapter, with Spencer tracking the decision to substitute 'power' for 'strength' and describing the feeling of his dead sister 'applauding my words, with soft insistence' as he reads it aloud to her body in the casket. The passage is extraordinary in its obliviousness. The book's other victims include three ex-wives (dispatched in a parenthetical as 'all double divorcees'), Princess Margaret, Princess Michael of Kent, Peter Carter-Ruck, a police protection unit whose dogs jumped on his furniture in 1986, and a television producer from a network he will never watch. The drive-bys accumulate. The reader begins to wonder whether Diana, in this book, is eulogy or backdrop. What saves it — barely — is the structural truth at the centre of the story. Spencer's fury at Prince Charles is not merely personal; it is the fury of a witness who watched his sister trapped inside a system she had no tools to understand and no real allies to help her escape. His account of Charles ignoring Diana at parties, commenting on her weight, and telling her he did not love her during their courtship, combined with their father's response when Diana tried to exit the engagement ('it's too late'), describes a failure of care that is not merely royal dysfunction but something closer to institutional cruelty. The funeral speech, for all the self-congratulation Spencer ladles over it, was a proxy act of rage on her behalf, and that rage is the book's most honest emotion. The question the review carefully raises — whether Spencer has been advising his nephew Harry — goes unanswered, and wisely so. But the comparison hangs in the air. Both men carry genuine grievances wrapped in enough self-regard to make the grievances harder to hear. The difference is that Spencer's subject, Diana herself, remains sympathetic throughout — frozen, as the review puts it, at the mercy of other people's interpretations. That includes her brother's.
