A Royal Duty: The poignant and remarkable untold story of the Princess of Wales

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it gives a first hand rendition of the crumbling marriage and eventual divorce of the prince and princess of wales. Burrell's exalted sense of duty, as keeper of the Diana flame, might even provide the excuse for the release of more prince-relatedtittle-tattle from his decades of invisibility. The author obviously only ever had the Princess's well-being at heart and I don't think he would ever have done anything to hurt her or her memory. also i would take some of the things he say with a grain of salt since the novel is written by him and about ~his~ perspective of events. although, i have to admit that when i heard the other day that he is planning to release another book on diana soon, his credibility starts to slip.

As a TV correspondent, Burrell has provided commentary for the Diamond Jubilee of Her Majesty the Queen and for the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

There is the occasional moment where information is repeated several times and the timeline gets a bit muddied as Burrell reflects back on certain occasions; despite these flaws, the context is well-written and easy to read through. The Queen is the camp of people Paul likes (like most people in the UK who aren't mad keen to get rid of the freeloaders aristocracy and replace the system with a republic. It doesn't take someone with a graduate degree in psychology (which I have, I should add) to realize Paul Burrell (and Diana, to be honest) have some issues. which I find fascinating (although I still have lots of questions about the role of ladies-in-waiting).

She was dependent upon him for everything under the sun and Paul was the strongest pillar of her life. He was the Princess' most intimate confidante - and is the only person able to separate the myth from the truth of the Diana years. I understand that he tried to make her look as human as possible while also telling the truth about the last years of her life. How completely juxtaposed is their demeanor despite each of them growing up amid aristocracy, wealth — dare I say privilege — yet experiencing similar parental neglect and criticism. I think the emotional dependence on both Paul's and Diana's side was way too big and that was the problem.

Also, Paul has a wife and family but yet states clearly that his loyalty was/is foremost to Diana - all day, every day. There she was in that huge meringue dress, still a teenager, marrying a prince who said, at their engagement when asked by a reporter, that yes he did love Diana, "whatever love is" and gave Camilla a bracelet with their entwined initials the night before his wedding.

Although Burrell plainly got a tremendous thrill from the camp, girly aspects of her dependency - sharing the sunbed, shrieking over gossip, picking outfits - he can still summon up enough objectivity to see that her enslavement of his entire life was not really very humanitarian at all.Prince Charles doesn't squeeze his own toothpaste (for real), throws books when he has a tantrum and shouts, petulantly, "I'm going to be King. I read this book a long time ago and remembered when I saw it here, that I really, really enjoyed it back then. i felt a little slimy while reading due to the fact he swears up and down to love princess diana and want to protect her and her legacy at all cost while using previously unseen pictures of her inside and on the back cover of the novel to sell it to the masses. It sat on my shelf for a very long time, until the anniversary of Princess Diana's death a few weeks ago, got me to thinking about pulling this one out. As for Burrell: his claims to be record-keeping should be resisted until he is more open about his sources.

in actual fact i found that this was a very even handed account - only mildly sensational and other than that, just a really interesting insight into the way the royal family functions. Catherine Bennett finds the Windsors' treatment of their domestic staff appalling in Paul Burrell's memoir, A Royal Duty, and Rebecca Tyrrel's portrait of Camilla Parker-Bowles. At once, it confirmed both the person I thought the princess was and the person I thought Charles was during this time.

Prince Philip - tough but fair - receives his first good press in half a century as counsellor to Diana, while the union between these paragons is presented, in contrast to many recent accounts, as a model to us all: "I never once heard a raised voice between husband and wife . Now, thanks to Tyrrel's exhaustive exploration of the what-does-he-see-in-her question, we can be fairly sure that we will never know the answer. you're rich and living off a dead woman and you hint that you will never, ever, ever let anyone know who she was really in love with and lots of other secrets only you were privy too. He started to get more and ingratiating and smug, constantly detailing how close his relationship with Diana became, how many gifts she gave him, how close he was to all her friends.