'I was trying to cut wrists with razors'

The sensational Diana tapes, recorded in Kensington Palace in 1991, will reopen old wounds for the royal family. Here are the main details.

Pain of life with Charles

Diana had bitter words for the way Prince Charles treated her as she struggled with royal duties made worse by constant media attention. "My husband made me feel inadequate in every possible way. Every time I came up for air, he pushed me back down again.

"I hated myself so much. I didn't think I was good enough. The public side - they wanted a fairy princess, someone who touched them and everything-would turn to gold. Little did they realise that the individual was crucifying herself inside."

Her anger then was in stark contrast to how she felt when he first asked her to marry him. She said: "I remember thinking, 'This is a joke'. So I said, 'OK', and laughed. He was deadly serious and he said, 'you do realise one day you will be Queen?' And a voice inside me said, you won't be Queen but you will have a tough role."

Like many a bride she got cold feet on her wedding day: "I said, 'I cannot marry him. I cannot do this'." But she was eventually talked around by her family. By the time she came to walk up the aisle she was, she said, "very, very deathly calm, deathly, deathly calm ... I felt as though I was a lamb to the slaughter". In the early days she said she really did love him. But her hopes for a happy marriage were, she said, "slashed" as early as the second day of her honeymoon when he spent most of the time reading. By the time the marriage was five months old she was feeling "desperate".

"Charles said I was 'crying wolf ' and I said I just felt so desperate and I was crying my eyes out. He said, 'I'm not going to listen ... I'm going riding now'. So I threw myself down the stairs, bearing in mind I was carrying a child. The Queen comes out, absolutely horrified, shaking she's so frightened. I knew I wasn't going to lose the baby. Charles went out riding, and when he came back it was total dismissal."

She also recounted how she tried to cut her wrists and threw herself into a glass cabinet at Kensington Palace.

Her reason for making the tapes was made abundantly clear when she talked about her divorce. "I want people to understand the torment and anguish going on inside my head," she said. "I'm not spoilt. I just need to be allowed to adapt to my new position."

Fear of the Queen

Diana's relationship with the Queen did not run entirely smoothly - right from the moment she went to stay at Balmoral and had to meet the Queen for the first time. "I was shitting bricks ... I was terrified," she said. She also accused the Queen of spreading stories about their marital problems. Prince Charles " definitely told her about my bulimia", she claimed. "She told everybody that was the reason our marriage cracked up."

Her fight with illness

Diana described herself as having "a very unhappy childhood". She recalled: "I remember seeing my father slap my mother across the face and I was crying on the floor."

But her real problems began after she became engaged to Charles. "Bulimia started the week after we were engaged," she said. "My husband had his hand on my waist and said, 'Ooh, a bit chubby aren't we?' And that triggered something in me."

Once she returned early from the annual stay in Scotland. She said: "I had to come down for treatment because I was so depressed. And I was trying to cut my wrists with razor blades.

"Once I picked up his penknife off his dressing table and scratched myself down my chest and both thighs. There was a lot of blood." She said Charles had "no reaction whatsoever".

Birth of her children

When pregnant with William, Diana wanted to be induced but said it was difficult to schedule a birth date around Charles's polo matches. On Harry, she said: "When he was born - it just was bang. Our marriage down the drain. And Charles, all he wanted was a girl. First comment was, 'Oh God it's a boy', second comment, 'Oh no, he's even got red hair !'"

Her rival Camilla

Camilla Parker Bowles cast a long shadow over their relationship even before they were married. Diana recalled walking up the aisle looking for her husband's former lover. After she spotted her, Diana recalled thinking: "There we are. That's it. Let's hope that's all over with."

It was not. Even during their honeymoon Charles carried two photographs of Camilla in his diary, she said.

She also said she once heard Charles, in the bath, talking to Camilla by telephone. "Charles said, 'I will always love you'." Before long she knew that she had lost him for ever. When she became pregnant for a second time, she said: "By then I knew he had gone back to his lady, but somehow we managed to have Harry."