Think of it this way. The object of desire, the Beauty, the Blonde (Diana), is repeatedly subjected to the unwelcome attentions of a persistent suitor (the Camera) until the dashing, glamorous knight (riding his Automobile) sweeps her away. The Camera, with its unavoidably phallic long-lensed snout, gives pursuit. And the story reaches its tragic climax, for the Automobile is driven not by a hero but by a clumsy drunk. Put not your trust in fairy tales or chivalrous knights. The object of desire, in the moment of her death, sees the phallic lenses advancing upon her, snapping, snapping. Think of it this way, and the pornography of Diana Spencer's death becomes apparent. She died in a sublimated sexual assault.
SALMAN RUSHDIE
New Yorker

No. It was the first word of that cataclysmic Sunday morning: "no" pronounced through an ascending sob, the consonant left behind in the chest voice as the vowel climbed into the head voice, the pure wail of lament whereby anyone, no matter how tone deaf, for one terrible moment becomes a singer. But there was not one terrible moment. There were, still are, hundreds of them, joining up in a long aria of anguish interrupted only by exhaustion. Hundreds of millions of people who loved her but never met her must be crying like this. Those who did meet her, and knew her faults, should have some detachment. But somehow it works in reverse. The physics of this unprecedented metaphysical explosion, this starburst of regret, are counterintuitive, like relativity.
CLIVE JAMES
New Yorker

Tomorrow, the globe will stop spinning in panic, and I will stop feeling so dizzy with grief. Tomorrow, a sister will be officially handed over to the impatient authority of death. Here, among the living, some would have gladly gone instead of her... Tomorrow, the people will queue and queue not for bread, but to pay their respects to a woman who gave us something else to live on; the dream that one person can make a difference. Diana provided the food of the soul.
ANVAR KHAN
The Herald

The more you know she was never perfect, the less you, who are not perfect either, are able to detach the loss of her from the loss of yourself, and so you have gone down with her, down that Acherontic tunnel by the Pont de l'Alma and into the Halls of Dis, the inane regions, where loneliness is the only thing there is, and the lost are together but can never find each other, because it is like looking for a shadow in the dark.
CLIVE JAMES
New Yorker

The Panorama interview was much more than a blatantly partisan account of her marriage; it marked her invention, at a stroke, of a new and multi-faceted identity for herself. Appropriating the language of such disparate discourses as traditional romance, psychotherapy and even feminism, she had succeeded in reaching out to the broadest of all possible constituencies... What Diana seemed to have forgotten, and most people were too dazzled by her performance to recall, was the traditional fate of the women with whom she had chosen to bracket herself. Clytemnestra, Medea, Phaedra, Sophonisba, Dido, Lucretia, Desdemona, Madame Butterfly, Violetta, Norma, Mimi, even twentieth-century heroines like Maria from West Side Story: they all wind up young, beautiful and dead.
JOAN SMITH
Observer

CONTRIBUTORS: Everyone, Andrew Gilchrist, Glyn Johnson, Everyone.

£10 paid for entries.

Please email submissions, with full name and address, to Strobes at Private Eye.