Even in childhood photos Diana seems to pose, as if watching her own show. Her gaze flits sideways, as if to check everyone is looking at her. One “friend” told a TV crew that as a teenager, “whenever you saw her alone she would have picked up some trashy romantic novel.” Leave aside the casual denigration of women’s taste: if Diana imagined herself—the least and youngest daughter—as magnificent, all-conquering, a queen, she had a means of turning her daydream into fact.

Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self-…, loc. 286