Confronted

An unnamed photographer «spotted» the Princess with friends in a Kensington mews. He took some pictures but handed over his film

when allegedly being confronted by a royal detective with Diana herself intervening. She was claimed to have «begged» for the film.

Yard chiefs studied a report on the incident which highlighted the fears of the Royalty Protection Squad about freelance photo­graphers who hounded Diana day and night.

Quite apart from the distress they were causing the Princess, their continued presence was becoming a security nightmare.

Whenever Diana moved from her London home at Kensington Palace the paparazzi went too. They pooled their resources and watched every exit. They knew every royal limousine and when Di­ana was seen they made their move.

Linked by walkie-talkies and on powerful motor bikes to weave through London's traffic, they had no difficulty in keeping up.

They had a detailed knowledge of Diana's «off-duty» habits, her favourite restaurants and shops and homes of friends and confi­dantes.

In the most public gilded cage in the world Diana found it a har­rowing existence.

(Richard Kay, Daily Mail)

Answer the following questions:

1. What was causing Diana distress?

2. What is your view about what was happening to Diana?

3. Was this the price she paid for being famous?

Why Diana moved us so

At the time it was a mystery. A divorced member of the royal family of a medium-sized European nation dies in a banal car acci­dent in Pans and for a week the sun, moon and stars are knocked off their appointed tracks. Within days, Europe suffers shortage of cut flowers as tens of thousands of bouquets are laid before the house of the victim. Demand for newsprint soars: the funeral, watched live on television through the world, attracts an audience of 1 billion.

Years later the mystery remains. What was the Diana phenomenon all about? The easy answer is nothing – or at least, nothing of last moment. The Queen, so criticized during Diana Week, is still on

her throne: Diana's former husband, Prince Charles is more popular than he has ever been for years. The French authorities are still look­ing for a white Fiat Uno. Other news knock the event from the front pages. And we wonder: those flowers, that grief, «The peoples' prin­cess» - were they all just a way of making the end of summer, a break from the reality that wafts back each year with cool of autumn?

Conventional wisdom assigns Diana the role of weird historical footnote, Diana was like a strange shaft that enabled us to see more clearly than even before the nature of our times. The public displays of grief were not feigned. Nor was it whipped up by the media who, truth to tell, spent a week racing to keep up with the public mood. The reaction to Diana's demise crystallized, perhaps, another death -that of the virtues that the classicists called Roman. Last year, stoic­ism, fatalism, muted emotions, all went by the board, as people not only felt, but showed what they felt, without shame. In a Western world where the obligations of religion, deference and submission to greater cause have lost their sway, feelings, and sharing them, are our only comfort.

The Roman virtues, of course, were masculine ones, and their celebrants male. Diana was not a guy thing. Sure, men wept. But Di­ana's champions were overwhelming women. Like many of them₃ she had a heartless husband, fickle boyfriends. She worried about and loved her kids, she wondered what life on her own would be like. Diana week was a time in which women could celebrate and mourn one who had come through the vicissitudes suffered by mil­lions and found, for a short summer, real happiness. What other lessons are there to be learnt from Diana's death? That the media have become a boundless force, for sure, broadcasting and interpreting events to the ends of the earth. And that the division between the media and their subjects has become blurred - not just because in her life Diana played the press and TV like a violin, which she surely did, but because the Coverage of her became part of the story, in a way that still touches some raw nerves.

Perhaps above all, Diana Week was a true global phenomenon. Globalization has become the decade's most overused word, but as its heart, it embodies a real truth: technology has made this a planet of shared experiences. Because globalization's theorists have primarily

been economists, we tend to think of it in economic terms, albeit with political consequences.

But there's more to globalization than markets. Diana's death touched people in Peoria as much as in Paris. We are bound together more than we have ever been. Her death showed the world how small it had become, how much in common are our intimate senses and emotions. Remember her.

(Michael Eluott)

Answer the following questions:

1. What do people call Diana? Why?

2. What lessons are learnt from the Princess' tragic death?

3. What is the prevailing tone of the extracts? (Compare it with that of the article of the tabloid newspaper).

4. What helps the authors to express their point of view?

5. What clichés are used in the articles? What is their function?

6. What is specific about the vocabulary chosen for the facts described?

7. Summerizing your observations speak on the type of the newspapers the articles are published in.