For those who still can’t get enough information about the life and times of Diana, Princess of Wales, and there appear to be millions of you, the Internet is a rich source. Indeed, there are so many Diana-related sites that you could spend hours searching for what you want. Here is a quick guide to some worthwhile addresses, as well as some, well, offbeat ones.
Buckingham Palace set up a special section on its Web site for Princess Diana immediately after her death, with a condolence book, an official biography, and later, details of the funeral arrangements and the text of Queen Elizabeth’s speech on Sept. 5.
There is nothing scintillating about this site (royal.gov.uk), but it is a place to leave a condolence message and there are a few scraps of information you might not have known, such as the fact that Queen Elizabeth was in the Chinese Dining Room of Buckingham Palace when she made that televised address.
The site has a biography of the Princess, but it glosses over much of what many people found interesting about her life. Her estrangement and divorce from Prince Charles, for instance, are treated as follows: “In December 1992 it was announced that The Prince and Princess of Wales had agreed to separate. They were divorced on 28 August 1996.”
There’s a far more colorful version of Diana’s life at a New Zealand obituary site for rock stars called “We’ll Always Remember.” The Diana page (hotshotdigital.com/DianaBio.html) has, for example, this passage about the decline of her marriage: “The royal caca didn’t really hit the fan until 1992, when a tell-all biography of Diana’s private hell hit the shelves. Reading about the turmoil of her palace life left a bewildered populace wondering how Charles could possibly give the cold shoulder to that gorgeous paragon of motherhood and fashion he claimed as a wife.”
If tell-all materal is what you like, you can get the transcript of her controversial interview with the BBC at a number of addresses, including the following: evansville.net/diana.html. This is the famous session in which she declared she would like to be “queen of people’s hearts.” The BBC, by the way, maintains a Diana site (bbc.co.uk/politics97/diana/) that does not offer a link to this interview but does have a link to both an audio and a video edition of Elton John’s “Goodbye England’s Rose.”
In addition, the BBC site has an extensive set of video clips from its television coverage of the funeral, including that astonishing moment when her funeral cortege emerged through the gates of Kensington Palace to a chorus of wails from mourners.
Prime Minister Blair’s reading during the funeral and Diana’s brother’s bitter tribute are here as well. There is a collection of still photos, and a lengthy report on Diana’s life. It’s better than the one on the official royal site, but tame compared to that sassy New Zealand site.
If you’re a true Diana fan, don’t miss the site maintained jointly by Time and People magazines (pathfinder.com/people/diana/index.html). There’s a synopsis of her life accompanied by an extensive set of photographs, which are quite sharply rendered. Some of them are memorable, including one of Diana and Prince Harry peeking out of a London restaurant, presumably to see if the coast was clear of photographers. It wasn’t, and this picture is the result.
If you’re interested in photos of the crash that killed the Princess, there is a set of them that traces the course of the fatal evening at a California site called “Now 2000” (now2000.com/di/photos.html). The shots include pictures published by Bild, the German tabloid, that other publications did not carry. They show rescue workers bending over what appears to be the wrecked Mercedes, but it is impossible to clearly make out anyone inside the car. A similar set of crash photos appears at: fulldisclosure.org/crash.html.
If you’re among those who think there’s something fishy about this whole thing, you might try the “Conspiracy Theory Discussion Board” (navigation-station.com/princess-diana-conspiracy.htm), which doesn’t purport to provide answers, only questions. Some examples: “Would the Palace have really stood for the mother of the future King (and future head of the Church of England) to have married a Muslim? What about the shocking resemblance between young Prince Harry and Diana’s former admitted lover, James Hewitt?”
For a more (but not much more) detailed look at such theories and the evidence for them, try the Londonet conspiracy site (londonnet.co.uk/ln/talk/news/diana-conspiracy-theories.html). This may be swamp fever stuff, but if you’ve got the fever, you can post your ideas here.
T.R. Reid is Rocky Mountain bureau chief of the Washington Post. Brit Hume is managing editor of Fox News in Washington. You can reach them in care of the Washington Post Writers Group, 1150 15th St., Washington D.C. 20071-9200, or you can e-mail T.R. Reid at [email protected], or Brit Hume at [email protected].