Familiar but fascinating

Princess Diana was two years my junior and eight years younger than her most recent biographer Tina Brown. Our collective generation was one in search of someone or something to provide the soundtrack to our lives. We hadn’t lived through the second world war, we were too young to have connected with Vietnam or fallen for Kennedy, Sinatra was already old and our own royal family appeared atrophied, boringly embalmed in pomp and circumstance.

We were Thatcher’s kids, who may well have been raised on a gentle diet of Mallory Towers and Jackie magazine but we were also seduced by punk and possibilities and ready for a seismic change. It was the dawn of a much racier media age. Diana’s fairytale marriage to Prince Charles in 1981 suddenly gave our generation a benchmark. She was the perfect embodiment of the spirit of the age, quickly becoming the poster girl for a hitherto unrecognised, rare and rather un-British phenomenon: that of emotional intelligence.