Ms. Hilton's defining moment was a webcam video of herself with a loomin phallus in her mouth, whereas Lady Diana Spencer at the age of 19 was beet-red-faced with embarrassment when a tabloid photographer snapped her with her infant charge outside a nursery school in a pose against the sunlight that revealed her shapely legs.

Diana took her celebrity and leveraged it into such moments of global humanitarian impact as being the first member of the British Establishment to kiss an AIDS baby, grasping the bandaged hand of a leper without gloves, and walking in an uncleared mine field to bring the media spotlight to the victims of anti-personnel mines. In her entire 16 years as Princess of Wales she was never once caught looking anything but her absolute best. Unlike Britney, Lindsay or any other of the pitiful starved waifs attached to hair weaves, she never acted out her private pain by throwing up in the backseat of a car, winding up in rehab or displaying her shaved pudenda to a stricken nation. If anyone else can think of a further point of resemblance between these two, suggestions gratefully received.

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I'm excited to be out of my writing cave with a book that's finally hitting the shelves. Writing it enabled me not only to write about Diana but to explore the British aristocracy, the monarchy and the world of celebrity culture through which Diana moved.

Check out the interview I did last week with Salon's editor, Joan Walsh, posted here. I talked to her about the book and the writing process, and my thoughts about its publication.

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The city has at least a dozen A-list screening rooms -- plush little mini-theaters tucked away in corporate suites or nondescript Times Square office buildings, where you can savor a movie in a tykes'n'teens-free zone with no crunching Twix bars and no high-fives after scenes of sex and violence. Thanks to the movie industry's longtime Washington lobbyist Jack Valenti, every single one of them is booked solid through January. My husband and I have been getting an unusually large number of calls from frantic entertainment functionaries, each of whom needs a bold-face name to host a "celebrity screening."

I'm sitting in a pleasant reverie at my desk when the phone explodes with a call from Peggy Siegal, New York's publicity diva, who's flacking Peter Weir's new movie, "Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World," based on the Patrick O'Brian seafaring series.

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Kozlowski is ear-hugging his cellphone, his tumescent bald head atop his looming CEO build looking starkly unprotected as his defense team huddles in the dingy hallway. Clumps of clerks, hacks and note-takers hurry past him to take their seats inside, leaving him to stand around tensely in his Zegna suit, a ruined tower of '90s excess. "Ha!" he says in a hearty voice when I introduce myself. "Maybe you can see I'm not the monster they say I am!" Kozlowski's Big Guy bonhomie and small shrewd eyes suggest how he managed over the years to award himself around $170 million in Tyco bonuses, raises, "loans," perks and every other imaginable genre of corporate bling-bling. It must be strange for a man who had only to bark into a squawk box for a corporate legal eagle to charge in with another acquisition document for him to sign to now be waiting for a young, slight-shouldered assistant D.A. in an off-the-rack suit to make the case that will probably send him up for years.

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It gives Democrats pause about Wesley Clark. He looks so perfect on paper. The four stars. The keen mind. The neat head. But where's his baggage? The great thing about having survived a media gangbang is that it quells the need to answer questions. Anything bad can be dismissed as an old story.

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I am sitting with Arianna Huffington in the dining room at Ballymaloe House in County Cork debating with her kids and mine whether to explore the tea shops of Bunratty or the rainswept cliffs of Ballycotton when there's another blast of the Tallyho overture from Arianna's cell phone. This time it's Warren Beatty. The gist of his message: "Run Arianna Run!"

Perhaps it's all a brilliant stunt, like Bunburying in "The Importance of Being Earnest," so she can escape the Irish weather. As I start to consider this possibility there's a cacophony of new calls -- from political consultants, Hollywood activists, media pundits, and, just when she had sat down again to enjoy the show-stopping summer pudding, a Hispanic labor leader who swears the fealty of all his members. Nope, it's real. We've only been in Ireland for two days and Arianna is heading back to L.A. to throw her hat in the California recall ring.

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The missing guest is Martha's pal Dr. Sam Waksal, once feted for his quest to market a new drug for colon cancer. While his friends flee the city on their private planes, the biotech millionaire, ex-chairman of ImClone and medical man about town has packed up his stylish SoHo loft to go to jail. I went by to see him with one of his friends just before he disappeared into the slammer for insider trading, tax evasion on art buys and obstruction of justice (i.e., lying to the feds).

He was nursing a sore gum. Upscale prisoners-to-be spend the last days of freedom in an orgy of root canal work. Jailhouse dentistry is notoriously fiendish and Waksal will be inside for seven years, no parole. His bitterest reflection is that he'll be locked up when Erbitux, the drug he battled to develop, will finally be helping cancer patients. It's about to receive approval from the FDA, the very agency whose rejection in 2001 triggered Waksal's illegal panic alert to family stockholders and the spiral of his decline.

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Instead of presiding this autumn as scheduled over convivial skull sessions at Ditchley Manor, the Oxfordshire country house for Anglo-American Big Thinks, Greenstock is headed for a portacabin in the military compound in the roiling stews of Baghdad.

The perverse thing about being a diplomat is that this is considered an honor. Because of the increasingly absurd compulsory retirement age of 60, too many of Her Majesty's most experienced diplomatic servants are pottering about Norfolk gardens when they could be sorting out some needy corner or ex-Empire.

Sir Jeremy, who hits the big six-oh on July 27, was plucked out by Tony Blair to be his special envoy for nine months of crisis management, getting the new Iraqi Governing Council off the ground and then, hey presto, creating a new constitution. His wife Lady Anne, who, like her husband, speaks "conversational Arabic," plans to go with him if she can carve out a decent role. "I am not going to twiddle my thumbs and go for long walks along the Tigris," she told a mutual friend.

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First we have the publication of Ed Klein's bioporn epic "The Kennedy Curse," with its hush-hush unraveling of the marriage of the late John F. Kennedy Jr. and poor, doomed Carolyn Bessette. This has given the tabs an excuse to rerun all those elegant, sexy pictures -- Carolyn dashing from apartment buildings like a gorgeous greyhound fleeing her troubled secrets, John with his softly chiseled hurt handsomeness and his smooth Adonis-like musculature.

Hard on the heels of Klein's revisionism comes the rather more startling news of the marital Chernobyl of Kerry Kennedy Cuomo, Bobby and Ethel Kennedy's high-minded human rights activist daughter. Kerry -- mother of three, sister/niece/cousin/aunt of too many to count -- dumps her thrusting politico husband, Andrew Cuomo, for a charmingly caddish lounge lizard, restaurateur Bruce Colley.

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There's a moment of truth at movie premieres when all the hype -- the cellphones and VIP passes and 7-foot-tall security goons with earbuds guarding the seats reserved for the star's pedicurist and Kabbalah instructor -- is vindicated. Barry Diller once described this moment to me at an Oscar party as "the exact second when all the bullshit metastasizes."

At the "Legally Blonde" opening the magic moment is at 10 p.m. when Reese Witherspoon -- pregnant, but only in the tiny, bowler-hat-under-the-gossamer-mini-dress way young movie stars have perfected -- makes her way through the after-party throng in a shimmer of lip gloss and flash bulbs. "You were great in 'American Psycho,'" says my nephew, who figures this strategy allows him to protect his film purism. "Whatever," says Reese, with an absent-minded, vestigially irritated smile.

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Stothard paints a portrait of a prime minister in a hurry, for whom the Labor Party and the House of Commons itself are just obstacles he has to navigate to get what he wants done.

Blair is now formidably tough. Perhaps he always was, beneath his mannerly charm. As Stothard notes, "He has grown used to winning arguments, to winning elections, to defeating opposition in his party, to almost destroying his official opposition in Parliament. He has discovered that he can absorb attack after attack and still be left standing." And, it seems, in the aftermath of war, the worst is yet to come.

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She's been charged with securities fraud, conspiracy and obstruction of justice -- all of which she allegedly did to cover up insider trading, a crime they didn't indict her for. This is a twist that lends the legal circus the flavor of an Upper East Side "Les Miserables." It helps, too, that the lean and hungry prosecutor, James Comey, is 6-foot-8 -- a nice casting detail for a looming fanatic.

It's puzzling that a marketing genius like Martha -- perhaps it's a sign of unusual psychic disarray -- took so long to fire up the activist Web site now besieged with supportive e-mails.

High-flying women who have hitherto been low-key about Martha are now roused to come out of the woodwork, too. The combative radio talker Laura Ingraham, author of that pitiless book on Hillary Clinton, announced on my CNBC show the other night in a conversation with the writer-director Nora Ephron and Whoopi Goldberg that Martha was getting a "bum rap. She's a mogul. People resent her."

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It's always puzzled me that any discussion of the Clintons' 30-year union turns polarized and shrill. The publication of "Living History" seems to have done nothing to change that. Hillary haters will never find her version convincing. For those who like her, though, it fills out the clues that were there in the early student photographs.

When they met, in their Yale Law School days in the '70s, Hillary Rodham was almost defiantly dowdy: Coke-bottle glasses, bushy eyebrows, not a lick of makeup, and a clothes sense that was little short of tragic. In "Living History" Hillary recalls how appalled the false-eyelash-batting Virginia Clinton was when her son brought home this austere fiancée. She had to enlist Bill's stepfather to win his mother round. One can only smile at the con man in slick Bill when (as Hillary describes it) he followed her out of a lecture at Yale and admired "the long flowered skirt" her mother had made her.

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Maybe the end of the wild ride of the '90s has mellowed them out. They are now at the point where they have made vast fortunes, cartwheeled intact through one crisis after another, and metamorphosed into touchy-feely dads.

In the past, at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Gates would arrive by helicopter, make his speech and lift off again like a visiting U.S. president. At the D Conference he worked the cocktail party and hung out with eager, next-generation geeks. He's still a version of the large, freckly, animatronic schoolboy with jerky movements and high insistent voice, but now he wears a self-deprecating smile that's almost appealing. To the charge that Microsoft has never been creatively daring enough to break out and take the big leap he replied mildly, "Dropping out of school and starting Microsoft was a pretty big leap." Say hello to Buddha Bill.

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Perhaps the reason fans and Web sites are obsessed with deconstructing the pseudo-gravitas of "The Matrix Reloaded" is that the real thing has almost entirely disappeared from public life. The other night at a Park Avenue dinner party there was a big debate about who these days does and does not have gravitas. Turned out it was slim pickings. Colin Powell, because his aura goes beyond the office he holds, but who else? Dick Cheney, the Morpheus of the Bush administration, simply proves that grouchiness and gravitas are not the same thing.

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And now the 800-page memoir of the former journalist and White House aide Sidney Blumenthal, in which his erstwhile friend Christopher Hitchens (boo hiss!) plays the role of Whittaker Chambers. My head is spinning with cries of J'accuse!

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There's always a commercial payoff to any cataclysm in America and in the case of 9/11 it was the marketing of anxiety. It suddenly legitimized every other form of affluent terror and brought the subterranean pill thing -- growing since the explosion of Prozac in 1987 -- out of the closet. Now, at water coolers all over town, people earnestly debate which prescription drugs make the best "chasers" to even out the side effects of the meds they're already taking. There's even a certain one-upmanship about which one you're on. It's cooler to throw out that you're taking Luvox for anxiety rather than the more familiar Xanax.

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Mother's Day is a much bigger deal here as well. Like every other Special Day in America it's used as a GNP booster -- another opportunity to make us all go shopping for Victoria's Secret negligee sets, gift editions of Maya Angelou's poems, and beribboned jeroboams of Estée Lauder scent.

My mother died four years ago and I don't need the ads to make me miss her. She was far and away my closest friend. I didn't rebel against her in my teenage years because she was more subversive than any of my peers.

Physically, we couldn't have been less alike. She was a tall, dramatic brunette with a diva-like presence who always dressed in vibrant Mediterranean colors. When all her contemporaries in the '50s were wearing pouffe skirts and rollerset waves, she wore austere scarlet sheath dresses and a Maria Callas bun.

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There's usually a fair amount of glitz on offer, but movie stars are so out of sync with Dubya's Washington that practically the only ones who showed up were minor novelty offerings like the star of "The Bachelorette" and Bo Derek, the Republican war horse. At Oscar weekend you have Nicole Kidman to look at. Here you had to make do with Alan Greenspan. The Newsweek pre-party was where the action was. I found myself in a dark corner with the brooding neocon ideologue Richard Perle -- known as the godfather of the war -- trying to have a light exchange about Shiites.

Traditionally in years past, the president gives a humorous speech (or tries to) and then gets lambasted for a good 20 minutes by an A-list comedian. This could get edgy. (And who really likes roasts anyway? The roastee laughs heartily, then lies awake at night boiling for revenge.) In 1996 at the Radio and Television Correspondents' Dinner the radio loudmouth Don Imus appalled the crowd with crude sex jokes about the Clintons, who were sitting 10 feet away, not even pretending to enjoy themselves.

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