He knew that he could walk naked across a room, secure in the knowledge that all was as it should be.' The narrative gushingly jumps between the points of view of the Princess and the Major, although, in the bits about sex, the perspective is orgasmically simultaneous: 'Weekends sped by in a haze of sybaritic abandonment. There were few sighs in their brief snatches of heaven.' I thought sex was, ideally, supposed to lead to 'sighs', and the indication that Diana's 'snatches of heaven' were 'brief' suggests that Ms Pasternak is quietly undercutting her subject's claims as a lover But this was probably an accident. A line about the unhappy Princess Diana spending 'hours lying in bed dissecting her body' seems to be terrifying confirmation of the self-mutilation habit outlined by Morton, until you realise that it is merely the author's clumsiness.Yet the important thing about the Hewitt revelations is not their content but their context: the fact that they can be published. Call me new-fashioned, but I feel a certain relief at the news that the Princess of Wales may have been sexually active in recent years.

If earlier accounts - dating the breakdown of the Wales's marriage from the mid-Eighties - are to be believed, and they have not been seriously disputed, then the total celibacy of the Princess always seemed an unlikely, indeed unpleasant, outcome.A glance through the newspapers and magazines of the Eighties would confirm that the specific quality the Princess of Wales contributed to the British Royal Family was sex, although the word sometimes appeared in its mufti formulation 'glamour'. She was pictured and written about for nearly a decade as one of the world's most alluring women. It can be argued that there is no direct connection between sexiness and sex - starlets' bedroom memoirs have fingered some of rock music's erotic gods as being indifferent in bed - but it still seems to me that Diana was being asked to live out an impossible paradox. Ideally, she should have been sleeping with her husband but, if this had ceased to be an option for reasons revealed in other best- selling books, then it can scarcely be a scandal that alternative arrangements were made. The Hewitt story raises only one serious constitutional point, which is the possibility that the Royal bloodline might have been complicated. Only if there were any doubt about the paternity of the young princes - and the dates given in Princess In Love are exonerating on this point - would there be anything to get worked up about.So the content is uninteresting - largely a confirmation of earlier tittle-tattle - and it is the context that we should consider.

For some, Major Hewitt's behaviour - by which is generally meant not adultery itself, but the publication of a book about it - demonstrates a decline in military standards. In the past, we are told, a soldier would have kept quiet or, details of his indiscretion having emerged, 'known what to do' (ie shot himself). Personally, I cannot get very nostalgic about an era when people put a bullet in their heads to prevent embarrassment to the Establishment Times change. Boris Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago, Anna Pasternak, his great-niece, co-wrote Princess In Love. Each of these books is a reflection of the culture from which they sprang.The most interesting aspect of Princess In Love is that its publication confirms the unstoppable growth of the gossip market, the rumour souk, in Western culture.