Originally written June 10, 2005.

The tabloids have recently taken to calling Britney Spears "the former pop princess". What do they mean - that she's out of the game? that she's a woman now so she can't be a "princess" any more? Or that she's a has-been? Probably a mixture of all three.

Originally written December 22, 2004.

Britney Spears recently received an extraordinary accolade from the UK’s highly respected top broadsheet newspaper the Daily Telegraph: “Amid all the fretting and frothing about her sanity…it's easy to forget Britney's pop brilliance. Sweeter-voiced than Beyoncé, Christina and Pink, she has had a string of classics to put the pretenders to shame. Baby One More Time, Oops, Slave 4 U, Toxic… Britney is the pop artist of her generation.”

Originally written July 1, 2005.

Larry Getlen concluded his book "Britney: not that innocent", with these words:

"...with 2003 halfway over, here's where the career of Britney Spears stands. The press finds her an irrelevant party girl who has lost her appeal. Teenage girls have said en masse that they not only don't care about Britney, but they feel it necessary to write and sign petitions against her. Her image as a good girl and role model is shot to hell. The power she wields in Hollywood is down to almost nothing. And it is all but scrawled in the sky that after three albums and tours and millions of CDs sold, the only thing about her that anyone cares a lick about is her tits."

 Originally written December 5, 2005.

 Would the world still be talking about Britney Spears if it had't been for Baby One More Time? It's a matter for conjecture. What we can be certain of is that it was one of a set of circumstances that came together like the conjunction of astral forces to launch one of the most remarkable careers in the history of pop music and, as a media commentator recently noted, "the most talked about woman in America".