Unlikely heroes and anti-heroes emerged. A viral favorite was John Bercow, the barrel-chested Speaker of the House of Commons, whose calls for "Order… - Tina Brown

By many measures, though, Brown's eighties world was less rule-governed than the present, and some rascals show their colors early on its schoolyard turf. In June of 1986, Brown goes to Oxford for a story on the death of a young heiress from a heroin overdose. She hires a student journalist, Allegra Mostyn-Owen, to make introductions. Mostyn-Owen fobs off Brown at a lunch with posh kids and her boyfriend, "a young fogey with a thatch of blond hair and a plummy voice called Boris Johnson." A bit later, the Sunday Telegraph publishes, under Mostyn-Owen’s byline, a snarky account of Brown's visit, centered on the lunch. Brown finds that she's extensively misquoted—unsurprisingly, since Mostyn-Owen wasn't there. "Boris Johnson is an epic shit," Brown concludes. "I hope he ends badly."

Princess Diana, the shy introvert unable to cope with public life, has emerged as the star of the world's stage. Prince Charles, the public star unable to enjoy a satisfying private life, has made peace at last with his inner self. While he withdraws into his inner world, his wife withdraws into her outer world. Her panic attacks come when she is left alone and adulation-free on wet days at Balmoral; his come when his father tells him he must stop being such a wimp and behave like a future king. What they share is an increasing loss of reality. Ironically, both are alienated by the change in the other.

Large, blond, and ebullient in his well-tailored suits, my father filled a room with his commanding height and broken nose.