Linda Colley Quotes

I was first to break the news about the death of Lady Diana. The CNN team couldn't get into makeup fast enough.

For much of the final decade of the 20th century, one story regularly dominated the news across much of the developed world. It was the unravelling of the marriage between the heir to the British throne and his beautiful, charismatic princess, Diana.

When Princess Diana died, I couldn't understand why people were mourning her death in such an enormous, hysterical way when they didn't actually know her for real.

Stories about Diana's fashions, about possible rows between Charles and Diana, these were meat and drink.

Lady Diana Spencer looked to relatively unknown designers - David and Elizabeth Emanuel, recently graduated from the Royal College of Art - when she wed Prince Charles in 1981.

I was too shy to go and meet Princess Diana.

Social media reactions to celebrity death have taken on a predictable pattern: an outpouring of shock with expressions of grief, followed by a ghoulish need to know all the details, to see the scene of the death and the family in mourning. Then a post-mortem dissection of all the perceived flaws the celebrity had.

It was in August or September of 1995 that I met Diana, Princess of Wales. Diana and I met through Oonagh Toffolo, whose husband was recovering from heart surgery at the Royal Brompton. At the time, I was working for Professor Yacoub, the heart surgeon, and Mr. Toffolo was one of his patients, so I was involved in his medical treatment and care.

I got asked by a freelance journalist to jump in front of Princess Diana's funeral. How pathetic is that? That would have been the stupidest thing on the planet.

When Princess Diana got married, I was a very little kid, I think. I remember her dress, and I found the dress amazing when I was a kid.

A few weeks before the jubilee began in 2002, Queen Elizabeth died, and the public outpouring of grief and affection, with hundreds of thousands of people queuing for hours to pass by her coffin, showed how widely and deeply loved she was.

It has been the most extraordinary occasion, the most comprehensive and controlled display of public grief I am ever likely to witness.

My mother had just died, and I had to walk a long way behind her coffin, surrounded by thousands of people watching me while millions more did on television. I don't think any child should be asked to do that under any circumstances.

The film 'The Queen' came about with a producer saying to me that he wanted me to write about the circumstances behind Diana's death. I think he was hoping that I would come up with some journalistic scoop that would identify an MI5 covert plot.

Ask anyone where they were when they heard of Diana's death, and they won't hesitate, because nobody can forget. Along with 9/11, it remains the most poleaxeing public event, news so shocking it made me shake, and drove everything else from my mind for days.

In my hometown of New Orleans, grief is a public spectacle that, somewhat paradoxically, necessitates celebration. The dead are not mourned so much as they are posthumously venerated with music and dance.

The first thing that bothers me after any celebrity death happens is that my phone starts buzzing for a bite.

There's a deep affection and respect for the Queen and the monarchy in the U.K. But Diana was an extraordinary, iconic figure and her death sparked a fierce reaction, part grief and part anger at her being taken away. It was very fraught.

In her final months Princess Diana was being shat upon by the tabloids -- basically for sleeping with an Arab. When she died, these same papers were astonished by the millennial wave of emotionalism that swept the country ... One paper had a print-ready story about what a slag the Princess was, and they had to pull it at the last moment. It was replaced with an image of Diana as an angel, ascending to heaven.

[Princess Margaret] was loud, an extrovert, an exhibitionist, loved fashion, loved color, loved music, loved drama, loved the theater, wanted to be a ballerina or actress, was always the little one putting on the school plays, and [princess] Elizabeth reluctantly did it and got stage fright.

I love being in London because it means I am breathing the same air as the Queen.

I think there are a number of reasons, not least of which is the personality of the Queen [ Elizabeth II]. It's very easy to underrate her significance. I think she finds the Commonwealth and her position as Head of the Commonwealth infinitely more interesting than being the Queen of England, because she has no significant role in the latter.

[Queen Elizabeth] is just the granny queen! She's our granny queen who shakes people's hands!

None mourn more ostentatiously over the death of Germanicus than those who most rejoice at it [a death].

There will be no more British guys. Unless they are members of the royal family, of course.