A fresh look at Princess Diana's life

The Diana Chronicles, By Tina Brown, Doubleday, 542 pp., $27.50

Princess Diana's image, splashed on newsmagazine covers on the runup to the 10th anniversary of her death, is a sad bit of nostalgia these days. Her face reminds us that despite all we knew, or thought we knew, thanks to the countless tabloid stories and photos, friends' tell-all books, and her own confessional interviews, so much about Diana still seems shrouded in uncertainty. "The Diana Chronicles," by Tina Brown, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker, peels many layers of the mystery away and even makes the old horror stories of her life seem fresh.

It's no mean feat. Those stories -- the bouts with bulimia, the rows with Prince Charles over his trysts with Camilla Parker Bowles , Squidgygate -- are so tightly embroidered into the larger epic that they could hardly be avoided by any biographer . Brown gives them new vigor, with insights based on her own exhaustive research and a wickedly canny, celebrity-trained eye for detail.

In more than 500 pages Brown takes us on the lonely journey of Diana's life, starting, deftly, with her last night in Paris before switching to scenes of her alienated childhood. Brown wears a deep sympathy for her subject on her sleeve early on, writing that if only Diana had been loved by her husband, things might have turned out well. But Charles, who famously answered in an interview during his and Diana's engagement that he was in love, "whatever 'in love' means," gets an even-handed treatment here, and Diana herself is not spared for the sake of her memory.

Diana's story is, of course, the mother of all cautionary tales. Teenage girls warned never to count on a man for their happiness weren't the only royal-watchers swept up in the glamour of their union. First on that list was Diana, who read and reread Barbara Cartland romance novels and made no secret of her intention to snare the Prince of Wales.

Thanks to an impressive canvassing of Diana's upbringing and coming-of-age years, Brown draws a telling portrait of a girl who couldn't pass her O levels but managed real ingenuity when torturing her governesses and, later, thwarting and beguiling the press while getting her man.

Brown plumbs the familiar secondary sources, including all the tabloids, Andrew Morton's officially sanctioned biography , and disaffected former staff members. What makes the book remarkable is her ability to reach deep into her formidable Rolodex for interviews with the likes of Colin Powell and Henry Kissinger, and to use them to great effect.

An entertaining passage explains how the 1995 BBC interview came about in which Diana uttered the memorable lines about wanting to be queen of people's hearts and having to put up with two other people in her marriage. Taped in Kensington Palace on a Sunday when the staff was absent, the well-rehearsed Diana managed to co-opt the media institution that had for 50 years negotiated carefully with the crown in arranging broadcasts of all state occasions.

After Diana's marriage dissolved and she'd lost the formal title of Her Royal Highness, events that Brown translates for American readers unversed in the nuances of title and rank, Diana was on shaky ground. Brown compares her to a character in a play by David Hare who is "so aristocratic she thinks electricity is free."

For it all to come tumbling down to celebrity exile in the company of billionaire oil heir Dodi Fayed still seems bewildering to some. Brown writes convincingly that Diana was never engaged to Fayed as she describes their deaths in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997 .

Brown has said in interviews that she knew "The Diana Chronicles" had to hit all the bases to take her into a new phase of her career. Fortunately for her as well as the reader, this worldly and engaging book is far from simply a recounting of a woman, known the world over, whose hopes and longings went fatally wrong.

Amy Graves is a freelance writer living in Cambridge.