Word: diana
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...larger scale, Diana's contribution to history is both paradoxical and inadvertent. She will go down as the chief saboteur of the monarchy. It wasn't just the divorce, the tell-all boyfriend, the married rugby star. She introduced an informality, a candid modernity, into a system that could offer no resistance to it; she had a beauty in her life that made them ugly...
...Diana Spencer was nothing like as gifted as Judy Garland, nowhere near as sexy as Marilyn Monroe, but like those equally doomed young women, she had the power to touch us--that is to say, if one examines the response dispassionately, to make us feel sorry for her. She was a terribly mixed-up kid. We felt close to her (when we were not infuriated by her) because she represented in herself so many of the worries our own children are likely to foist upon us--disappointing school grades, anorexia and bulimia, unsuitable young men, a tendency to show...
...course, this is partly a tabloid mourning, just as Diana herself had become a tabloid star--almost a fictional star. Since the days of Thomas Hardy at least, people have been moved to passionate sorrow by the death of public personalities they have never met, and who sometimes never existed. No doubt thousands wept over the fate of Tess of the d'Urbervilles when her story appeared week by week in the Graphic in 1890, just as truly as they wept for Diana when they read of her death in the Sun in 1997. They have been deluded into thinking...
...panties thrown onstage soon leading to a storm of votive lingerie. It is partly resentment against the in-laws. Despite late damage limitation from the palace, many Britons see the British royal family as villains in this soap opera, stuffy and reactionary guardians of an old order into which Diana came as a lovely catalyst, only to be spurned as young heroines so often...
...perhaps, I like to think, the death of Diana has acted as a kind of catharsis for her nation. This has not been a happy half-century for the British. It has been a time of frustration and febrile self-doubt. Most of the national institutions, from the monarchy itself to the BBC, have lost their old sense of confident authority. In an age when no island is an island anymore, the very national identity, once apparently so unassailable, has been whittled away. British traditions have been discarded, British values have lost their meaning. A great people seems...