Life & Wisdom Quote by Jonathan Dimbleby

There’s a quiet flex buried in Dimbleby’s plainspoken sentence: access. Not to a person, exactly, but to the private paper trail that turns a public figure into a narratable human being. “Over the last two years” signals duration and labor, the long-marinated legitimacy of the biographer who didn’t just parachute in for a hot take. “Comb through” is the key verb - tactile, methodical, almost forensic - implying both diligence and selectivity. Archives don’t speak; they’re made to speak by someone willing to sift, correlate, and decide what counts.

The repeated “I have been able… I have been free” does double duty. On the surface, it’s gratitude for permission. Underneath, it’s credentialing: a reminder that this story is authorized, sourced, closer to the inner room than the gossip economy. The phrase “The Prince’s archives” also performs deference while keeping the subject slightly abstracted, title-first. This isn’t intimate confession; it’s sanctioned intimacy, proximity with guardrails.

Then comes the inventory: “journals, diaries… many thousands of the letters.” The accumulation matters. It’s not one sensational document; it’s volume, pattern, a claim to comprehensiveness that preemptively rebuts charges of cherry-picking. At the same time, listing these formats cues the reader to expect psychological texture - the private self over the podium self - while quietly raising the ethical stakes. Dimbleby positions himself as both witness and interpreter, asking you to trust that his access won’t become voyeurism, and that the paper mountain will yield something more than trivia: motive, contradiction, and the machinery behind monarchy’s carefully edited image.