Just about anyone in Britain can tell you where they were and what they were doing on the morning of August 31 1997, when the world learnt that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed in a car crash in Paris. The same is almost certainly true of millions more worldwide.
The British people still haven’t got over the event. It is not so much that they cannot adjust to the death of a hugely pretty princess who seemed to embody the little girl’s dream gone bad, as what her death represented. It was the moment the royal family entered the modern world.
Diana had been the last of the royal consorts to be chosen on the antediluvian prejudices of a household clearly baffled by the world beyond the palace gates. She was one of the last victims of a cast of mind which thought the main purpose of educating girls was to teach them how to wear white gloves and open village fêtes.