Book Assails Diana for Britain’s Tide of Sentimentality

LONDON — Princess Diana was accused Friday of unleashing a tide of sentimentality in uptight Britain and hurting the royal family with her obsessive personality.

In the first real criticism of Diana since her death last August, a group of right-wing academics dismissed her in a new book as a self-indulgent woman whose childish outbursts and victim’s mentality were a liability to family and country.

“She was overemotional and emotionally self-indulgent. What else do you say of somebody who throws herself down stairs and goes on hunger strike and who parades all her deepest personal problems on television in front of the whole nation?” the book’s co-editor Peter Mullen asked in an interview.

The princess’ death in a Paris car crash unleashed a groundswell of grieving, and few have dared speak out against her memory.

But Mullen, an Anglican clergyman, attacked her sentimentality as a pernicious national influence.

The new book, “Faking It--the Sentimentalization of Modern Society,” was published Friday by a right-wing think tank, the Social Affairs Unit.