# The Pont de l'Alma Tunnel *A Biography of Princess Diana* — Legendary Biographies No. 188 - **Subject:** Diana Frances Spencer - **Written by:** Vivian Ashcombe - **Shelf:** Power & Politics / World Politics - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 196 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-138-3) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Camille Rhodes (ISBN 979-8-90623-468-1) - **Content notes:** eating disorder; fatal car accident Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/188-the-pont-de-l-alma-tunnel.html ## About this book August 31, 1997, 12:23 a.m. Paris time, the Pont de l'Alma tunnel. The Mercedes-Benz S280 driven by Henri Paul, the Ritz Paris's deputy head of security who is intoxicated and fleeing the paparazzi at 105 km/h in a 50 km/h zone, strikes the thirteenth pillar of the tunnel. Diana Frances Spencer, thirty-six, the Princess of Wales, dies of internal bleeding at Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital at 4:00 a.m. Paris time. Her companion Dodi Fayed and Paul are killed at the scene. The bodyguard Trevor Rees-Jones, the only seatbelted occupant, survives. Vivian Ashcombe's biography opens earlier — at Park House on the Sandringham estate, where Diana was born on July 1, 1961, the third daughter of Viscount Althorp and his first wife — and follows the arc through the West Heath School years, the Park House-to-Althorp aristocratic childhood, the 1981 engagement to Prince Charles, the July 29, 1981 St. Paul's Cathedral wedding the world watched, the births of William (1982) and Harry (1984), the long Camilla Parker Bowles shadow and the December 1995 Panorama interview with Martin Bashir, the August 1996 divorce, the long anti-landmines campaign and the Halo Trust visit to Angola in January 1997, the Dodi Fayed summer-1997 relationship, the August 1997 Paris weekend, and the Pont de l'Alma. What emerges is a portrait of the Princess of Wales whose fifteen years as the most-photographed woman in the world remade what a royal could be — and the Paris tunnel that the British monarchy has spent the years since trying to live around. ## Contents 1. Park House 2. The Spencer Inheritance 3. The Courtship 4. The Wedding 5. Bulimia 6. The Camilla Question 7. The AIDS Handshake 8. The Photographs 9. The Boys 10. Squidgygate 11. Andrew Morton 12. Panorama 13. The Divorce 14. The Landmines 15. Dodi 16. The Ritz 17. The Funeral 18. The Contested Reputation 19. The Legacy 20. The Photographic Record ## Questions **Who is The Pont de l'Alma Tunnel about?** Diana Frances Spencer. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Pont de l'Alma Tunnel — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,342 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 59,500 words, 20 chapters, 196 pages in the paperback. **Does this book carry content warnings?** Yes: eating disorder; fatal car accident. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle. ## The writer Vivian Ashcombe spent twenty years as a foreign correspondent before she started writing books. She reported from Moscow, Jerusalem, and Kyiv for the Financial Times and The Atlantic, with stretches embedded in Tehran and Damascus. Her biographies trace power and the people who hold it. Drawing on decades of notebook-shorthand and archival research, her books examine the intersection of public policy and private influence. In her biographies, including The Consulate, The Moscow Exile, and The Pont de l'Alma Tunnel, she reconstructs historical events through meticulous primary-source analysis. She lives in south London, where she spends her spare time restoring mid-century furniture and volunteering at a local community archive.