Jenny Diski writes:

As sometime editor of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, Brown had a couple of lunches with Diana (Four Seasons, Anna Wintour, a charity do). Moreover, as she lists in her seven pages of acknowledgments, she knows all (two full pages) the right people (Lord Rothschild, Henry Kissinger, Bruce Oldfield, Emma Soames), quantities (three paragraphs) of the right researchers, and even the right London hotel owner, who made ‘a room available every time I hit town’ for ‘a demanding writer with a moody computer’ in his ‘comfortable, centrally located and fashionably cool’ hotel. The full list of books ‘that have enriched this one’ takes up four pages. And, doubtless with great relief because photo booths are so often out of order, she thanks, too, ‘the gifted photographer Annie Leibovitz’, who ‘with her usual generosity insisted on taking the portrait the publisher required for my book jacket’.

(LRB 2 August 2007)

Century | hardback 481 pp. |ISBN: 9781846052866