The princess’s brother who put her back in her box

by · Australian Financial Review

Nicola Shulman
Oct 1, 2026 – 5.00am

If you review books, you get to throw out a lot of questions without hope of having them answered. Here’s one I asked last summer, in relation to the upbringing of Diana, Princess of Wales: “It is now almost impossible to imagine the insignificance of a third daughter, born between two prayed-for boys – the elder dead in infancy, the younger living – in a primogeniture-practising family at the middle of the last century, yet this lowly person became the most famous woman in the world. How must her brother have felt?”

Well, now we know. People have been wondering why Charles Spencer decided to write a book about his dead sister, Diana. Money? Attention? Revenge? We cannot know; and it’s fair to believe that he acted, according to his own beliefs, on the conventional motive of setting the record straight.

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