Tina Brown has our number, and she lets us know it before the interview even begins.
The former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker and Talk, whose latest star vehicle is a book called The Diana Chronicles, straddles a chair in front of a bookcase in her spacious East Side apartment.

“Have you read many Diana books?” she inquires, straight-faced, as if one look at rumpled, male us hasn’t established our membership in the class of American consumers least likely to be obsessed with the life, death and cosmic meaning of the Princess of Wales.

Hers is our first, we confess. A hint of a smile. “You’re my ideal reader, then,” she says.

Brown has been lauded as a magazine genius who rescued the New Yorker from irrelevance and denounced as a buzz-crazed hack who tried to destroy it. But she’s never been criticised for lacking ambition. The Diana Chronicles is no exception to the rule.

Was an estimated $2 million advance enough? No, it wasn’t.
Will she be satisfied if she sells a zillion copies to the Diana-obsessed? She will not.

Success, for Brown, will mean convincing the skeptics that she has done something important. We can’t help asking, as we approach the 10th anniversary of that paparazzi-haunted Paris crash: Does the world really need another book about Di?

She set out, she says, to write cultural history, not just celebrity biography. For someone interested in “the ’80s and ’90s in England, the media and celebrity culture,” Diana was the perfect narrative vehicle.

... contd.