Charles Spencer has written a book about his sister, Diana, Princess of Wales. It is called Swan Song. It is a memoir of their relationship, and according to the review, it tells us "a little about Diana and a great deal about Charles Spencer - perhaps more than we needed to know." So, a standard family memoir, then, but with better hats.

The book runs 400 pages and is described as a "furious exercise in score-settling" featuring "chest thumping, wild indiscretion and some truly touching passages about his late sister." The reviewer notes that amid the genuinely touching bits, the earl "can't help but put himself and his grievances centre stage." The reader is left with "a head-spinning story of the world that created Diana and a certain sourness at the manner in which it is told." So: informative, moving, and slightly nauseating, like a royal documentary narrated by a man grinding an axe.

Let's get to the headlines, because there are headlines. Last week's Daily Mail, the newspaper to whom Spencer sold serialisation, ran the top line that shortly after Diana's death, King Charles insulted her in a phone call to Spencer. The quote: "'Rest assured,' he hissed, 'we'll forget her soon enough.'" The reviewer's take: "I'm willing to believe the king behaved badly, but 'hissed' is a red flag, one of those embellishments, like 'snarled' or 'flounced', that writers tend to use to make those they're writing about appear worse." Fair point. Nobody hisses in real life except snakes and villains in Dickens adaptations.

The book also includes a line describing tabloid journalists as "those who inhabit the murky swamps of malevolence, and who need to suck their victims dry of their souls." Which is a bold sentence to write in a book you have sold to the Daily Mail for serialisation. Perhaps he meant a different set of hacks. Perhaps the cheque cleared. We may never know.

The reviewer concludes that Spencer, "always the injured party, has so many axes grinding away in this book that at times it's impossible to hear what he's saying." So if you're looking for a nuanced portrait of Diana, this may not be it. If you're looking for 400 pages of a man settling scores with the enthusiasm of someone who has been storing them up since childhood, step right up.