What was that all about?

For all the emotion and sense of crisis that surrounded it, the death and mourning of Princess Diana—re-lived in Stephen Frears’s new film—was one of the most spectacular non-events of our time

Above: A sea of people crowd around the enormous carpet of ﬂowers deposited by mourners at the gates of Princess Diana’s former residence in London on Sept. 7, 1997.

By James Parker

October 1, 2006

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THE DAYS BETWEEN Aug. 31 and Sept. 6 1997 have been characterized in Britain as the occasion of a national nervous breakdown. The death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in a Parisian underpass during the small hours of a Saturday morning initiated a week of emotion, delusion, recrimination, mourning on a mass scale, and constitutional near-crisis. Normal life was suspended, ... (Full article: 1402 words)