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The Haunting of Prince Harry

By Rebecca Mead

Balmoral Castle, in the Scottish Highlands, was Queen Elizabeth’s preferred resort among her several castles and palaces, and in the opening pages of “ Spare ” (Random House), the much anticipated, luridly leaked, and compellingly artful autobiography of Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, its environs are intimately described. We get the red-coated footman attending the heavy front door; the mackintoshes hanging on hooks; the cream-and-gold wallpaper; and the statue of Queen Victoria, to which Harry and his older brother, William, always bowed when passing. Beyond lay the castle’s fifty bedrooms—including the one known in the brothers’ childhood as the nursery, unequally divided into two. William occupied the larger half, with a double bed and a splendid view; Harry’s portion was more modest, with a bed frame too high for a child to scale, a mattress that sagged in the middle, and crisp bedding that was “pulled tight as a snare drum, so expertly smoothed that you could easily spot the century’s worth of patched holes and tears.”

It was in this bedroom, early in the morning of August 31, 1997, that Harry, aged twelve, was awakened by his father, Charles, then the Prince of Wales, with the terrible news that had already broken across the world: the princes’ mother, Princess Diana, from whom Charles had been divorced a year earlier and estranged long before that, had died in a car crash in Paris. “He was standing at the edge of the bed, looking down,” Harry writes of the moment in which he learned of the loss that would reshape his personality and determine the course of his life. He goes on to describe his father’s appearance with an unusual simile: “His white dressing gown made him seem like a ghost in a play.”

What ghost would that be, and what play? The big one, of course, bearing the name of that other brooding princely Aitch: Hamlet. Within the first few pages of “Spare,” Shakespeare’s play is alluded to more than once. There’s a jocular reference: “To beard or not to beard” is how Harry foreshadows a contentious family debate over whether he should be clean-shaven on his wedding day. And there’s an instance far graver: an account, in the prologue, of a fraught encounter between Harry, William, and Charles in April, 2021, a few hours after the funeral of the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen’s husband and the Royal Family’s patriarch, at Windsor. The meeting had been called by Harry in the vain hope that he might get his obdurate parent and sibling, first and second in line to the throne, to see why he and his wife, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, had felt it necessary to flee Britain for North America, relinquishing their royal roles, if not their ducal titles. The three men met in Frogmore Gardens, on the Windsor estate, which includes the last resting place of many illustrious ancestors, and as they walked its gravel paths they talked with increasing tension about their apparently irreconcilable differences. They “were now smack in the middle of the Royal Burial Ground,” Harry writes, “more up to our ankles in bodies than Prince Hamlet.”

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King Charles, as he became upon the death of Queen Elizabeth , in September, will not find much to like in “Spare,” which may offer the most thoroughgoing scything of treacherous royals and their scheming courtiers since the Prince of Denmark’s bloody swath through the halls of Elsinore. Queen Camilla, formerly “the Other Woman” in Charles and Diana’s unhappy marriage, is, Harry judges, “dangerous,” having “sacrificed me on her personal PR altar.” William’s wife, Kate, now the Princess of Wales, is haughty and cool, brushing off Meghan’s homeopathic remedies. William himself is domineering and insecure, with a wealth of other deficits: “his familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me; his alarming baldness, more advanced than my own; his famous resemblance to Mummy, which was fading with time.” Charles is, for the most part, more tenderly drawn. In “Spare,” the King is a figure of tragic pathos, whose frequently repeated term of endearment for Harry, “darling boy,” most often precedes an admission that there is nothing to be done—or, at least, nothing he can do—about the burden of their shared lot as members of the nation’s most important, most privileged, most scrutinized, most publicly dysfunctional family. “Please, boys—don’t make my final years a misery,” he pleads, in Harry’s account of the burial-ground showdown.

As painful as Charles must find the book’s revealing content, he might grudgingly approve of Harry’s Shakespearean flourishes in delivering it. Thirty-odd years ago, in giving the annual Shakespeare Birthday Lecture at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon, the future monarch spoke of the eternal relevance of the playwright’s insights into human nature, citing, among other references, Hamlet’s monologue with the phrase “What a piece of work is a man!” Shakespeare, Charles told his audience, offers us “blunt reminders of the flaws in our own personalities, and of the mess which we so often make of our lives.” In “Spare,” Harry describes his father’s devotion to Shakespeare, paraphrasing Charles’s message about the Bard’s works in terms that seem to refer equally to that other pillar of British identity, the monarchy: “They’re our shared heritage, we should be cherishing them, safeguarding them, and instead we’re letting them die.”

Harry counts himself among “the Shakespeareless hordes,” bored and confused as a teen-ager when his father drags him to see performances of the Royal Shakespeare Company; disinclined to read much of anything, least of all the freighted works of Britain’s national author. (“Not really big on books,” he confesses to Meghan Markle when, on their second date, she tells him she’s having an “Eat, Pray, Love” summer, and he has no idea what she’s on about.) Harry at least gives a compelling excuse for his inability to discover what his father so valued, though it’s probably not one that he gave to his schoolmasters at Eton. “I tried to change,” he recalls. “I opened Hamlet . Hmm: Lonely prince, obsessed with dead parent, watches remaining parent fall in love with dead parent’s usurper . . . ? I slammed it shut. No, thank you.”

That passage indicates another spectral figure haunting the text of “Spare”—that of Harry’s ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer. Harry, or his publishing house—which paid a reported twenty-million-dollar advance for the book—could not have chosen better. Moehringer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter turned memoirist and novelist, as well as the ghostwriter of, most notably, Andre Agassi’s thrillingly candid memoir, “ Open .” In that book, published in 2009, a tennis ace once reviled for his denim shorts and flowing mullet revealed himself to be a troubled, tennis-hating neurotic with father issues and an unreliable hairpiece. When the title and the cover art of “Spare” were made public, late last year, the kinship between the two books—single-word title; closeup, set-jaw portrait—indicated that they were to be understood as fraternal works in the Moehringer œuvre. Moehringer has what is usually called a novelist’s eye for detail, effectively deployed in “Spare.” That patched, starched bed linen at Balmoral, emblazoned with E.R., the formal initials of the Queen , is, of course, a metaphor for the constricting, and quite possibly threadbare, fabric of the institution of monarchy itself.

Moehringer has also bestowed upon Harry the legacy that his father was unable to force on him: a felicitous familiarity with the British literary canon. The language of Shakespeare rings in his sentences. Those wanton journalists who publish falsehoods or half-truths? They treat the royals as insects: “What fun, to pluck their wings,” Harry writes, in an echo of “King Lear,” a play about the fragility of kingly authority. During his military training as a forward air controller, a role in which he guided the flights and firepower of pilots from an earthbound station, Harry describes the release of bombs as “spirits melting into air”—a phrase drawn from “The Tempest,” a play about a duke in exile across the water. Elevating flourishes like these give readers—perhaps British ones in particular—a shiver of recognition, as if the chords of “Jerusalem” were being struck on a church organ. But they also remind those readers of the necessary literary artifice at work in the enterprise of “Spare,” as Moehringer shapes Harry’s memories and obsessions, traumas and bugbears, into a coherent narrative: the peerless ghostwriter giving voice to the Shakespeareless prince.

Moehringer has fashioned the Duke of Sussex’s life story into a tight three-act drama, consisting of his occasionally wayward youth; his decade of military service, which included two tours of duty in Afghanistan; and his relationship with Meghan. Throughout, there are numerous bombshells, which—thanks to the o’er hasty publication of the book’s Spanish edition—did not so much melt into air as materialize into clickbait. These included the allegation that, in 1998, Camilla leaked word to a tabloid of her first meeting with Prince William—according to Harry, the opening sally in a campaign to secure marriage to Charles and a throne by his side. (Harry does not mention that, at the time, Camilla’s personal assistant took responsibility for the leak—she’d told her husband, a media executive, who’d told a friend, who’d told someone at the Sun , who’d printed it. Bloody journalists.) They also include less consequential but more titillating arcana, such as Harry’s account of losing his virginity, in a field behind a pub, to an unnamed older woman, who treated him “not unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze.” The Daily Mail , Harry’s longtime media nemesis, had a field day with that revelation, door-stepping a now forty-four-year-old businesswoman to come up with the deathless headline “Horse-loving ex-model six years older than Harry, who once breathlessly revealed the Prince left her mouth numb with passionate kissing in a muddy field, refuses to discuss whether she is the keen horsewoman who took his virginity in a field.”

The leaks have done the book’s sales no harm, and neither have Harry’s pre-publication interviews on “Good Morning America” and “60 Minutes”; in the U.K., Harry did an hour-and-a-half-long special with Tom Bradby, the journalist to whom Meghan tearfully bemoaned, in the fall of 2019, that “not many people have asked if I’m O.K.” But “Spare” is worth reading not just for its headline-generating details but also for its narrative force, its voice, and its sometimes surprising wit. Harry describes his trepidation in telling his brother that he intended to propose to Meghan: William “predicted a host of difficulties I could expect if I hooked up with an ‘American actress,’ a phrase he always managed to make sound like ‘convicted felon’ ”—an observation so splendid that a reader can only hope it was actually Harry’s.

There is much in the book that people conversant with the contours of the Prince’s life, insofar as they have hitherto been reported, will find familiar. At the same time, Harry bursts any number of inaccurate reports, including a rumored flirtation with another convicted fel— sorry, American actress, Cameron Diaz: “I was never within fifty meters of Ms. Diaz, further proof that if you like reading pure bollocks then royal biographies are just your thing.” Not a few of the incidents Harry chooses to describe in detail are centered on images or stories already in the public domain, such as being beset by paparazzi when leaving night clubs—he explains that he started being ferried away in the trunk of his driver’s car so as to avoid lashing out at his pursuers—and being required to perform uncomfortable media interviews while serving in Afghanistan in exchange for the newspapers’ keeping shtum about his deployment, for security reasons. (An Australian publication blew the embargo, and Harry was swiftly extracted from the battlefield.)

Given that what Harry dredges up from his past are so often things that have been publicly documented, one wonders whether Moehringer was obliged to indulge Harry’s extended dilation upon media-inflicted wounds , through Zoom sessions that even sympathetic readers will find exhausting to contemplate. There is a certain amount of score-settling and record-straightening, which, though obviously important to the author, can be wearying to a reader, who may feel that if she has to read another word about those accursed bridesmaids’ dresses—of who said what to whom, and who caused whom to cry—she just might burst into tears herself. More significantly, though, there are broadsides against unforgivable intrusions committed by the press, including phone hacking. (Harry is still engaged in lawsuits against a number of British newspapers that allegedly intercepted his voice mails more than a dozen years ago.)

And then there are pages and pages devoted to Harry’s personal trials, which even the most dogged reporter on Fleet Street would not dare dream of uncovering. Chief among these is Harry’s struggle to overcome penile frostnip after a charitable Arctic excursion with a group of veterans, which ends up in a clandestine visit to a Harley Street doctor; he writes, “North Pole, I told him. I went to the North Pole and now my South Pole is on the fritz.” “On the fritz” is an Americanism that we can hope Harry picked up while guiding American pilots—he calls them Yanks—back to base in Afghanistan, rather than the exchange being the ingenious invention of his ghostwriter. Moehringer, on the whole, does a good job of conveying the laddish argot of a millennial British prince, who addresses his friends as “mate” and—repeatedly—calls his penis his “todger.”

Above all, “Spare” is worth reading for its potential historical import, which is likely to resonate, if not to the crack of doom, then well into the reign of King Charles III, and even into that of his successor. As was the case in 1992 with the publication of “ Diana: Her True Story ,” by Andrew Morton—to whom, it was revealed after her death, the Princess of Wales gave her full coöperation, herself the ghost behind the writer—“Spare” is an unprecedented exposure of the Royal Family from the most deeply embedded of informants. The Prince in exile does not hesitate to detail the pettiness, the vanity, and the inglorious urge toward self-preservation of those who are now the monarchy’s highest-ranking representatives.

It’s not clear that even now, having authored a book, Harry entirely understands what a book is; when challenged by Tom Bradby about his decision to reveal private conversations after having railed so forcefully about the invasive tactics of the press, Harry replied, “The level of planting and leaking from other members of the family means that in my mind they have written countless books—certainly, millions of words have been dedicated to trying to trash my wife and myself to the point of where I had to leave my country.” Pity the poor ghostwriter who has to hear his craft compared to the spewing verbiage of the media churn—by its commissioning subject, no less. (Man, what a piece of work.) Remarkably, Prince Harry has suggested that he sees the book as an invitation to reconciliation, addressed to his father and brother—a way of speaking to them publicly when all his efforts to address them privately have failed to persuade. “Spare” is, you might say, Prince Harry’s “Mousetrap”—a literary device intended to catch the conscience of the King, and the King after him.

If so, the ruse seems about as likely to end well for Harry as Hamlet’s play-within-a-play efforts did for him. Moehringer, at least, knows this, even if Harry may hope that his own royal plot will swerve unexpectedly from implacable tragedy to restitutive melodrama. In a soaring coda, Moehringer has the Prince once again reflecting on the royal dead, describing the family he belongs to as nothing less than a death cult. “We christened and crowned, graduated and married, passed out and passed over our beloveds’ bones. Windsor Castle itself was a tomb, the walls filled with ancestors,” Harry writes. It’s a powerful motif: the Prince—shattered in childhood by his mother’s death, his every step determined by the inescapable legacy of the countless royal dead—as an unwilling Hamlet pushed, rather than leaping, into the grave.

Recalling the meeting with his father and brother in the Frogmore burial ground with which the book began, Harry invokes the most famous soliloquy from the play of Shakespeare’s that he says he once slammed shut: “Why were we here, lurking along the edge of that ‘undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns?’ ” Then comes a final, lovely, true, and utterly poetry-puncturing observation: “Though maybe that’s a more apt description of America.” In moving to the paradisaical climes of California, Harry has been spared a life he had no use for, which had no real use for him. The unlettered Prince has gained in life what Hamlet achieved only in death: his own story shaped on his own terms, thanks to the intervention of a skillful Horatio. You might almost call it Harry’s crowning achievement. ♦

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Prince Harry’s Spare is a sad and self-indicting portrait of royalty on the brink

The press is the villain but there are no heroes in Prince Harry’s new memoir.

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Spare , the explosive new memoir from Prince Harry, is a conflicted book. It feels like a diatribe from someone who has only recently learned that it is physically possible to talk openly about his life and his anger, and who now has no idea how to modulate himself. The result is occasionally insufferable, but also oddly fascinating. At times you wonder if it should ever have been made public.

By turns artless and lyrical, affectionate and bitter, Spare ’s 400 pages read in a chaotic swirl. It spirals from the death of Harry’s mother Princess Diana in 1997, across his stunted and laddish adolescence, through his manly army days and his marriage to Meghan Markle, and up to the point that he decided to step down as a senior member of the British royal family in 2020.

Throughout, Harry’s ghostwriter J.R. Moehringer channels Harry’s voice with disarming candor. Intimate details of royal life stream out unceasingly: the brown peat-sweetened water in the baths at Balmoral, the petty squabbles over parking spots at Kensington Palace, the miserly Windsor Christmas traditions. (Princess Margaret, upon gifting Harry a cheap ballpoint pen, points out that it has a tiny rubber fish wrapped around it. “Wow,” says Harry.)

Moehringer, who won a Pulitzer under his own name for his 2000 Los Angeles Times article “ Crossing Over ” and ghostwrote Andre Agassi’s celebrated memoir Open , presents Harry to the reader as a likably jockish sort, straightforward and uninterested in literary flourishes. His sentences are simple and sparse, often broken into single words. Harry (via Moehringer) introduces a Faulkner reference by noting that he found it on brainyquote.com, and he is charmingly overwhelmed by Meghan’s literary sophistication when she references Eat Pray Love , a book Harry informs us he has never heard of.

More Harry’s speed, it seems, are stories about how he lost his virginity (an older woman behind a pub) and how his penis was frostbitten during a trek to the North Pole (“Now my South Pole is on the fritz”). These he presents to the reader with a sort of dirty wink, an establishing of his credentials as a lad’s lad who would certainly never want to get in the way of anyone’s good time.

And yet even Harry, the subtext goes, can see that there is something badly wrong with the relationship between the British monarchy and the British press — especially when it comes to the way the British press treated Meghan, the British monarchy’s first member of color. So what’s everyone else’s excuse?

What, especially, is the excuse of Harry’s father and brother, King Charles and Prince William, that fraught, fragile family unit left behind after Diana’s death? They are the people to whom Harry was at one point closest in the world, and from whom he is now estranged. His relationships with them, and with his lost mother, are the beating heart of Spare .

Harry writes with palpable tenderness about Charles and William, whom he calls Pa and Willy. (In turn, Charles calls Harry “darling boy,” and William calls Harry “Harold.”) Charles appears during Harry’s childhood as an absentmindedly sweet man who leaves notes on Harry’s pillow about how proud he is of him. Every morning, Charles does headstands in his underwear for physical therapy, and he is attached to his childhood teddy bear, which he totes around everywhere. Meanwhile, William, the only person who truly understands the trauma of Diana’s death and of growing up in the glare of paparazzi flashbulbs, is in the first section of the book a partner in crime, a comrade, the first person Harry turns to with problems large and small: both when one of Diana’s old friends writes a tell-all, and when one of Harry’s school friends convinces him to shave off all his hair.

Yet Charles and William are both, in Harry’s telling, corrupted by the force of the crown, which pushes them to prioritize their own reputations and consider Harry’s expendable. Heirs, always, over spares.

“I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy,” he writes bluntly. “I was summoned to provide backup, distraction, diversion and, if necessary, a spare part. Kidney, perhaps. Blood transfusion. Speck of bone marrow.” In real life, William seems to be in little need of organ donations, but both he and Charles could always use something to take the pressure of the press’s attention off of them. Harry provides a handy distraction.

To that end, Charles allows his office to form an alliance with a journalist who falsely reports that a teenage Harry has gone to rehab for his cocaine use. Rather than denouncing the story, they use it to make Charles look sympathetic as the harried single father to a teen addict. (Harry darkly sees the hand of Camilla Parker Bowles, Charles’s longtime mistress and now queen consort, at work here, as the source for the piece is a known Camilla ally.)

The pattern continues for decades, with Charles and Camilla continually prioritizing their own rehabilitation narrative over the reputations of their children, and justifying the practice because they are the ones closest to the throne. They even, Harry reports, try to pressure Kate to change her name from Catherine to Katherine so as to avoid having too many royal “C”s. (Kate apparently declined.)

Meanwhile, William, Harry writes, is incensed with the way Harry gets to ignore the rules that regiment William’s own life: The heir must always be beyond reproach, but the spare gets to have fun. William has to shave his beard, but Harry gets to wear his even when in military uniform, in violation of protocol. William has to get married in his bright red Irish Guards uniform even though he prefers to wear the Household Cavalry frock coat uniform, but Harry gets to wear his uniform of choice to his own wedding.

To compensate for the loss of autonomy, Harry writes, William pulls rank constantly. As a teen, he tells Harry not to talk to him when they are both at Eton. As an adult, he seems put off that Meghan goes for a hug rather than a curtsy upon first meeting him. He squabbles over how he and Harry should split up their charitable concerns and tries to veto both Harry’s Invictus Games for wounded veterans and his environmental advocacy in Africa. “I let you have veterans,” he tells Harry, “why can’t you let me have African elephants and rhinos?”

When the tabloids falsely report that Meghan made Kate cry during the lead-up to her wedding with Harry (the truth, as Meghan told Oprah , is that Kate made Meghan cry), Harry traces the story to William, who fed it to Charles and Camilla, who fed it to the press. No correction, he writes, will ever be forthcoming from any of them, “because it would embarrass the future queen. The monarchy always, at all costs, had to be protected.”

Later, Harry writes that William has grown suspicious of the enlightened new attitudes Harry espouses post-Meghan, and post-therapy (suggested by Meghan). He seems to feel almost abandoned, as though Harry has left him behind in the suffocating structure of the monarchy. He refuses to join Harry in therapy, calling him “brainwashed.”

In the midst of one argument, William throws Harry to the floor so forcefully that a dog food dish shatters below him. The act is both violently aggressive and oddly plaintive, like the last resort of a spurned lover. “Come on, we always used to fight,” William says. “You’ll feel better if you hit me.” Harry refuses. As William leaves, he asks Harry not to tell Meghan about the incident and says, “I didn’t attack you, Harold.”

As in all families, deep betrayals and petty nonsense seem to hold equal emotional weight for the Windsors. Harry is justly furious with Camilla for the public relations rehab maneuver, but he’s also angry that she converted one of his many old bedrooms into her dressing room after he moved out, and that she once seemed bored talking to him at afternoon tea. He’s glad she makes his father happy, but he resents her for taking Charles away from him, in the same way that he resents Kate, whom he seems to genuinely like, for taking William away from him.

Harry is ambivalent not just about his family but also about the press, the central villain of this story and an object of fascination for him. He despises them, actively blames them for his mother’s death, compares the sound of a paparazzo’s clicking shutter to the sound of gunfire. He also reads their coverage obsessively, to the point that absorbing press coverage of the royal family seems to be his main hobby. He has nicknames for his least favorite journalists and follows the minutia of their careers with interest. When he bitterly mocks one reporter for starting two sentences in a row with the word “but” in a negative story written about him when he was 15 years old, he does so with the cadence of a man who’s been workshopping the bit in his head nonstop for multiple decades. A therapist suggests that he is addicted to the press, and he doesn’t dispute it.

The root trauma here is, of course, Diana: radiant, beloved, unreachable Diana. Harry was 12 years old when Diana died in a car crash in Paris. After her death, he had to march behind her coffin in a funeral procession while the world watched, and then shake hands and exchange pleasantries with the many mourners who had never met her, and whose hands were often, he writes in a striking detail, wet with their own tears. He himself only cried when Diana was interred, and then felt “ashamed of violating the family ethos.” Then he found himself unable to cry over her again until he was an adult.

In Spare , Harry writes about Diana with a child’s idealization. In his prose, she is beyond saints, beyond goddesses. When he meets a woman who remembers Diana cuddling her on a charity visit when she was a small child, he is overwhelmed with jealousy. Trauma has gnawed holes into all his own memories of his mother.

The army, in Harry’s narrative, both steadies and further traumatizes him. He feels that he grew up while on active duty, that he found his sense of purpose. (He believes wholeheartedly that the war in Afghanistan was just, although he notes that he doesn’t think the army was all that effective at swaying Afghan hearts and minds for the cause of Western democracy. He also makes a point of noting that he made sure each of the 25 people he killed were verified Taliban operatives and not civilians.) But after he returns from his tours, he begins to suffer from panic attacks every time he has to speak in public. Agoraphobia keeps him tethered to the tiny bachelor’s apartment his father has allotted him, watching Friends reruns and identifying with Chandler.

Things will be different, Harry thinks, when he is married. “You weren’t a fully vested member of the Royal Family, indeed a true human being, until you were wed,” he explains. After he’s married, he imagines, he won’t be afraid to go out in public, because his family will start to respect him. His grandmother will stop sticking him in the servant’s wing during holidays at Balmoral, because he’ll have more seniority. His father will up his allowance and give him a family home. He’ll get his beloved brother back, because he and William and Kate and whoever he marries will get to be couple friends together. And he’ll have, at long last, a partner, someone to replace the source of unconditional love he lost when his mother died.

Instead, when Harry marries, Charles tells him that he can’t afford to support both him and the Cambridges. (Supporting his children, Harry notes with outrage, was supposed to be part of Charles’s job as Prince of Wales, not something he did “out of any largesse.” After all, being the sons of the Prince of Wales rendered both William and Harry unemployable.) William darkly repeats tabloid stories about Meghan being pushy and abrasive, while Kate flinches away from Meghan’s American friendliness. And Meghan is so badly harassed by racist tabloids that she begins to struggle with suicidal ideation.

Harry does not explicitly blame the monarchy for any of these problems. In subtext, Spare is a searing indictment of the British crown, which Harry depicts as a force that warps family dynamics under the strength of its imperative: to protect the crown, and those in the direct line of succession, at the expense of everyone else. Yet textually, Harry declares his full-throated support for the monarchy and for his commander-in-chief. He writes lyrically of the “magic” of the crown itself, the beauty of its jewels, of how much he believes it means to the people of the British Commonwealth.

“The crown seemed to possess some inner energy source, something beyond the sum of its parts,” he writes, in an apparent attempt to square the difference. “But all I could think … was how tragic that it should remain locked up in this Tower.” The implication seems to be that the monarchy is strong and powerful and a force for good, but that it’s been hindered by forces that go too far to protect it. The idea appears nowhere else in Spare , and here it feels less than convincing.

Spare does not exist, though, for the monarchy. Spare exists, apparently, for William and Charles, the lost loves of Harry’s life, stolen from him by their wives, by the press, by the institution, by everything they chose before they chose him. He is writing and publishing Spare , he explains in the foreword, in order to explain to them why he felt he had to leave them and the rest of the family behind, to move to California and start over.

He can’t explain it to their faces, he writes. “It would take too long. Besides, they’re clearly not in the right frame of mind to listen. Not now, anyway. Not today. And so: Pa? Willy? World? Here you go.”

The tragedy of Spare is that everything Harry has told us makes it clear that Charles and William will take this memoir not as an explanation or a love letter but as a betrayal worse than anything they ever did to Harry, and that they may not be wrong. Even if they never read it, as seems highly possible, how can they avoid the endless stream of coverage, the interviews Harry has granted about the book, the Netflix documentary that came in December, the nonstop stream of information about Harry and Meghan that the two of them have flung out into the world? You close the book with the queasy sense that in reading it, you’ve been prying into something deathly private, that probably this book should not exist at all.

It’s as though Harry, who hates the press and its constant invasion of his privacy, has had to become press himself in order to finally bring the emotional force of his argument home. Because reading Spare , it’s hard to avoid the thought that we never had any right to these people’s lives at all.

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Spare is available to download on Amazon’s Audible here , with a free trial as well as paid membership

Prince Harry is a man in search of a purpose - a fact made abundantly clear from the outset (I mean, even before you’ve read a page, the title of the book is about as subtle as an Apache helicopter), and hammered home across 400-odd pages, where he seems to use the word “spare” again and again, like a cudgel to beat himself with.

Basically, as the third in line to the throne, Harry started life as a “spare” - only “necessary” should his brother William meet an untimely end. It’s a raw deal, psychologically speaking. He is now seventh in line (“very spare”?), so what’s next?

A search for meaning dominates the book. Harry is rarely happier than when at the controls of a £42 million Apache helicopter. “I can tell from the way you fly,” an instructor tells him, “this is what you were meant to do”. Bliss: a purpose and one that serves his country to boot (Harry loves Britain - the Union Jack flag pops up throughout the book). But deployment with the army in Afghanistan eventually proves too dangerous. Ruined, like much in Harry’s life, by the pesky press, whose leaking (or reporting, depending on which way you see it) of the details puts him and those around him in danger. His frustration is immeasurable and somewhat understandable. Yet while he blames the press he doesn’t touch on the brute fact that it’s his status which makes him a target. Harry never seriously considers that it simply might not be possible to be both a royal son and a soldier on active duty in the 21st century.

Some years later, he finds a place where he is even happier than when flying Apaches - and it’s with Meghan. After their early meetings he wonders: “What is this? What’s the word? Is it… The One? Have I found her? At long, long last?” Again, the desire for purpose and meaning is telling and Meghan gives it to him in spades. By his telling, she profoundly changes – and makes sense of – his life, which he describes (not inaccurately) as one which has been lived in a “gilded cage”.

He means royalty itself - though, this relentless search for a life’s purpose, a higher meaning (premised, as it seems to be for him, on the idea that everyone has their little box, it is just a matter of finding it - and climbing in) is surely constricting too?

And then there is also the cage of his past. The book opens – where else? – with the death of Diana. An awful event for any boy of twelve is, as we all know, intensified almost beyond belief by the grief of the nation and blanket coverage in the media. Harry is trapped by the memory of his mother, who he describes in effusive, angelic terms as being “light, pure and radiant light”. She is the divine being who hovers throughout the narrative and often floats, almost literally, before Harry’s eyes.

Then there is his obsession with the press which also seems to bind him. By his own admission he is addicted to reading stories about himself and his loved ones. His father, King Charles, his brother William and the late Queen Elizabeth all repeatedly plead with him not to read them. But he simply can’t or won’t stop.

This results in a number of scarcely believable scenes. When a blizzard of negative stories about Meghan begins to rage, for instance, she makes a (fairly sensible) decision to not to look at the internet. “She wanted to protect herself,” he writes, “keep that poison out of her brain. Smart”.

Harry, though, refuses to do anything quite so practical. To win the “battle for her reputation and physical safety”, he “needed to know exactly what was fact, what was false, and that meant asking her every few hours about something else that had appeared online”. It reduces Meghan to tears. Harry blames the press, and seems to take no responsibility for reading this stuff out to his girlfriend, in the process overriding her clearly stated wishes to just ignore it

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The tales Harry relates of press intrusion do leave you agog. Was there no peace on earth for this man, or his family? Photographers pop up everywhere, all the time. He cannot escape. He doesn’t always help himself, it has to be said. Once, on a lads trip to Vegas in 2012, he unwisely strips off as part of a jolly late night game (alcohol, as ever, was involved) and lo, the photos soon appear in the press. Other photos too - like those of him in a Nazi costume at a fancy dress party in 2005 (a catastrophic error he ungallantly tries to blame on William and Kate), and the 2003 photos of him kissing a girl in a club. Horrible and intrusive, but you do wonder: in nearly a decade, why didn’t you learn?

Part of the answer appears to be because he didn’t want to. Because he wanted to be free. Freedom is important to Harry (and important, too, to his new audience in America, where the Sussexes’ story is one of breaking free, telling their own truths, escaping the system). But what does freedom really mean to him? As we have  seen in the last few days, an important aspect of that is the liberty to talk about his family and the institution. But there are other things too.

He writes lovingly, and rather endlessly, about Africa, a continent which appears in this book as a refuge. It is where Harry finds solace and happiness in the brutal years after his mother’s death and freedom from intrusion. It is where he longs to take Meghan, having fallen head over heels with her instantly (in fact almost just from a clip of her on Instagram – “for thirty-two years I’d watched a conveyor belt of faces pass by and only a handful ever made me look twice. This woman stopped the conveyor-belt. This woman smashed the conveyor-belt to bits” – which I thought a touch dehumanising).

Harry suggests for their early courtship a trip to Botswana. His pitch to her is this: “Birthplace of all humankind. Most sparsely populated nation on earth. True garden of Eden, with 40 per cent of the land given over to Nature”. No mention of the people, except that there aren’t many. He’s not the only royal with a questionable attitude to the continent. At one point Prince William gets furiously angry with Harry and demands that Africa be his thing (the rhinos and elephants, that is) as Harry already has the Invictus Games. It’s not a good look.

The Harry that finds freedom in Africa is a different man to the one obsessed with the press – even his friends and girlfriends tell him he’s a different “Spike” (one of his endless nicknames) when there.

That’s not to say that he’s not fun when he’s back in Blighty. Harry had a deserved reputation as a party boy. In this book he drinks and takes drugs with great abandon. Indeed after his magical week in Botswana with Meghan, he heads off on a multi-phase lads trip complete with jetskiing in crocodile infested waters, bush cocktails and African beer, and “certain controlled substances”. Then there’s the marijuana, a habit which starts in his teens at Eton and appears to go on until possibly the present – he talks about smoking a joint at Tyler Perry’s house in Los Angeles, where he and Meghan briefly lived in 2020.

The partying is a piece of his silly side. Harry declares that he likes nothing more than making people laugh – a sweet, winning trait. He loves a bawdy joke too. Which perhaps explains why there is so much information – more than I expected – about his penis.

On a trip to the North Pole, Harry discovers frostnip (the forbear to frostbite) on his member. He goes to the doctor where, in another unintentionally revealing moment, he notes repeatedly that the doctor - who is preoccupied with something else - fails to look at him and so recognise exactly who he is. The doctor makes Harry wait and the prince feels slighted. The penis stuff goes on and on – you sense then, that Harry is still something of an unreformed ‘lad’. And it’s all wrapped up - as one of the book’s most startling passages shows - with his childhood.

A friend recommends Harry apply Elizabeth Arden cream to his frostnipped penis. “My mum used that on her lips. You want me to put that on my todger? It works, Harry. Trust me. I found a tube, and the minute I opened it the smell transported me through time. I felt as if my mother was right there in the room. Then I took a smidge and applied it… down there. ‘Weird’ doesn’t really do the feeling justice”.

That’s another unavoidable conclusion drawn from this book: Harry’s was a childhood arrested. Diana is a constant presence – Harry even visits a medium in LA to speak to her. Her son’s great quest is to avenge her, to fight the fight she was unable to do at the time, projecting, one feels, onto his own family many of his feelings about his mother and his relationship to her.

This arrested childhood also shows in the way that Harry speaks. William is Willy, Charles is Pa (not Dad, or Father) and Diana is Mummy. Always. There are references to “legends,” “lads,” and endless nicknames – Boose, Henners, Brent, Bidders, Jakie, Skippy and so on. He often sounds, when the ghostwriter allows him, like a teenager.

But his language is not always cuddly. On the subject of the press his vitriol is astounding (of course I may be somewhat biased myself on this subject). Rebekah Brooks, who he names bizarrely as “Rehabber Kooks” for a story she published about him – apparently not wanting to dignify her with a proper name, is described as a “loathsome toad… an infected pustule on the arse of humanity”. Another journalist, whom Harry agrees to be interviewed by, is portrayed as an addict: “I blurted something about not being normal, which caused the reporter’s mouth to fall open. Here we go . He was getting his headline, his news fix. Were his eyes rolling up into his head?” We weren’t there, Harry, so tell us: were they?

His extreme vitriol towards, and hatred for, the press is a family trait, but one which in Harry appears to reach extremes beyond what his father and brother experience. Clearly and obviously Harry feels it is not fair that he does entirely control the narrative of his life. That would be nice if it were possible, but that’s not how life works, royal or commoner.

A telling exchange takes place near the end, when King Charles tells Harry “the Institution can’t just tell the media what to do”. Harry writes: “Again, I yelped with laughter. It was like Pa saying he couldn’t just tell his valet what to do”. Once more – how revealing.

As a way to tell his own story, Spare is a triumph. But it shows its author often in an unflattering light: vain, status-obsessed, bitter and confused. It’s by turns elegantly written (the ghost writer J. R. Moehringer has done a very good job) and has sections that really ring true with Harry’s voice.

Why, though, did Harry write it? To tell his side of the story, to blow the whistle on the behaviour of the press and the way his family works, to avenge (perhaps) his mother. In these, it succeeds. He is a man, though, ever in search of a purpose. By the end, one senses he has found a new one: to tell the truth and change the world. Those are noble goals. But they may not be easy to achieve. It is hard not to fear, somehow, that the likeable, sweet, rather simple prince may soon find himself in search of meaning once more.

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• Entertainment
• <i>Spare</i> Is Surprisingly Well Written—Despite the Drama Around It

Spare Is Surprisingly Well Written—Despite the Drama Around It

G iven the many shocking, bizarre, and, in some cases, downright untoward leaks from Prince Harry’s memoir Spare before its Jan. 10 publication, readers might open the book expecting the kind of tell-all with no literary merit often churned out by celebrities. Headlines about Harry’s frostbitten penis and his physical altercation with Prince William primed us to expect something akin to a Real Housewives episode.

But Spare is filled with lyrical meditations on royal life. The book’s opening evokes none other than William Shakespeare; Harry awaits his father and brother at the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore, where many of his forebears are buried. The three men have agreed to a parley after Prince Philip’s funeral , a last-ditch effort to resolve some of the family conflicts that drove Harry from his ancestral home .

“I turned my back to the wind and saw, looming behind me, the Gothic ruin, which in reality was no more Gothic than the Millennium Wheel,” Harry writes. “Some clever architect, some bit of stagecraft. Like so much around here, I thought.” When his father and brother do arrive, they wander through the cemetery, and find themselves, Harry remembers, “more up to our ankles in bodies than Prince Hamlet.”

Perhaps Harry identifies with the morose, dithering prince. But in all likelihood Spare’ s ghostwriter, J.R. Moehringer, fashioned the graveyard scene to evoke the Bard’s tragic tale of succession. Moehringer’s impressive writing propels the reader quickly through the 416-page book. It’s a shame that Spare will be remembered more for the leaks about Harry’s wife Meghan Markle and his sister-in-law Kate Middleton squabbling over bridesmaids dresses than for its lovely prose.

Moehringer, a former newspaper reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, has spent years helping celebrities like Andre Agassi share their life stories. (Agassi sought him out after reading Moehringer’s own critically acclaimed memoir, The Tender Bar. ) Across Moehringer’s works—or, at least the ones we know about—he manages to spill his subjects’ petty grievances while still entrancing readers with his writing style. Whatever you think of the content, there’s no denying Spare is unflinching, introspective, and well-written.

Read More: How Celebrity Memoirs Got So Good

A good ghostwriter is able to extract memories from the subject and paint a vivid picture of those moments. Moehringer has said he tries to capture his subject’s voice, too. “You try and inhabit their skin,” he said in an interview with NPR about the writing process for Agassi’s Open . “And even though you’re thinking third person, you’re writing first person, so the processes are mirror images of each other, but they seem very simpatico.”

The details in Spare are Harry’s. Some are delightfully mundane, like the one about his father doing headstands every day in his underwear as part of his prescribed physical therapy. Others are weighty: it was made explicitly clear to the boys from birth that if William got sick, Harry, as the spare, might need to provide a “spare part”—a kidney or bone marrow—to save the heir. Moehringer, bringing an outsider’s perspective, is able to ground Harry’s personal feelings in the history of the monarchy and cultural significance of his position. In a moving passage, the two try to reconcile Harry’s tangible memories of his late mother, Princess Diana, with her icon status.

“Although my mother was a princess, named after a goddess, both those terms always felt weak, inadequate. People routinely compared her to icons and saints, from Nelson Mandela to Mother Teresa to Joan of Arc, but every such comparison, while lofty and loving, also felt wide of the mark. The most recognizable woman on the planet, one of the most beloved, my mother was simply indescribable, that was the plain truth. And yet…how could someone so far beyond everyday language remain so real, so palpably present, so exquisitely vivid in my mind? How was it possible that I could see her, clear as the swan skimming towards me on that indigo lake? How could I hear her laughter, loud as the songbirds in the bare trees—still?”

Such passages have so far been missing from the rabid press coverage of Spare . There are too many titillating details to keep the tabloids occupied. Since the book accidentally hit bookshelves in Spain days before its intended publication, outlets like Page Six and the Daily Mail have dug through the memoir’s pages for the most sensational parts. The tidbits were stripped of context. But in the book they do serve a larger purpose than spilling the tea.

The anecdote about Harry’s frostbitten nether regions, for instance, segues into a moment of reflection about the invasiveness of the press. “I don’t know why I should’ve been so reluctant to discuss my penis with Pa,” writes Harry. “My penis was a matter of public record, and indeed some public curiosity. The press had written about it extensively. There were countless stories in books, and papers (even the New York Times ) about Willy and me not being circumcised. Mummy had forbidden it, they all said.” It’s a rich detail, to be sure, but all the richer juxtaposed next to the fact that a paper of record had written about the prince’s penis long before Harry considered writing about it himself.

The rebellious royal is often funny: He jokes about the frostbite incident in an aside when he writes “my South Pole was on the fritz.” He also proves a surprisingly good narrator of his life story in the Spare audiobook: Harry’s voice is calm yet transfixing. His self-awareness is apparent when he chuckles at a line about his grandmother’s corgis. His insecurities shine through when he admits trepidatiously that William told his brother he only made Harry best man at his wedding because it was what the public expected. It is in these moments that Moehringer’s writing and Harry’s disposition find harmony.

The book is far from perfect. It ends with Harry rehashing stories about who in his family leaked what to the press that he has now shared with Oprah Winfrey and Anderson Cooper and Michael Strahan and Netflix. The constant litigation proves exhausting. Still, celebrity memoirs are usually categorized as “well-written” or “revealing.” Rarely both. Spare, in that sense, is special.

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Prince Harry's much talked about memoir 'Spare' is on bookstore shelves

NPR's Leila Fadel talks to Martin Pengelly of The Guardian , who obtained a copy of Spare before it was published. The book has created a major scandal involving the British royal family.

Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.

clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

The verdict on Prince Harry’s book: Juicy, humorous, resentful and sad

‘Spare’ delivers behind-the-scenes vignettes of the royals — and a hefty dose of anger at the family and the media

“Pandas and royal persons alike,” wrote Hilary Mantel in 2013 , “are expensive to conserve and ill-adapted to any modern environment. But aren’t they interesting? Aren’t they nice to look at? Some people find them endearing; some pity them for their precarious situation; everybody stares at them, and however airy the enclosure they inhabit, it’s still a cage.”

Suppose now that one of those pandas attempts to leave his cage in search of fresh bamboo. So begins the odyssey of Prince Harry, Duke of Sussex, who is technically still a prince and duke and still fifth in line to the British throne but who has turned his back on the monarchy for the sake of the woman he loves. An old-school gesture that puts him right up there with his great-great uncle Edward VIII, only the way he’s gone about it is so distinctly 21st century: a self-justifying, multiplatform pilgrimage — Non Mea Culpa , it might be called — which has pivoted from an Oprah sit-down to a Netflix documentary series and which now culminates — or, more likely, gathers steam — with a new memoir, “Spare.”

Tina Brown’s royal revelations spare no one, especially Meghan Markle

The title, in case you’re wondering, is the nickname bestowed on Harry in infancy. He was to be the second-born “Spare” to the “Heir,” his older brother William, future Prince of Wales. “I was the shadow,” he writes now, “the support, the Plan B. I was brought into the world in case something happened to Willy.” And if you ever doubted that’s a recipe for resentment, here are 400-plus pages to set you right.

Prince Harry memoir attacks a family he seeks to change. They have no comment.

Like Harry, the book is good-natured, rancorous, humorous, self-righteous, self-deprecating, long-winded. And every so often, bewildering. More questions are answered about the Prince’s todger than you would ever have thought to ask. (It’s circumcised, and it nearly froze to death at the North Pole.) And if you’re wondering to whom Harry lost his virginity, it was an older woman who “liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me not unlike a young stallion. Quick ride, after which she’d smacked my rump and sent me off to graze.”

Written with and almost surely elevated by J.R. Moehringer, who helped make Andre Agassi’s memoir so memorable, the book delivers behind-the-scenes vignettes of the royals (the Queen whisking up salad dressing, Charles executing headstands in his boxers) and liberal helpings of woo-woo: Princess Diana’s spirit turning up variously in a Botswana leopard, an Eton fox and a Tyler Perry painting and even finding a way to mess up Charles and Camilla’s wedding plans. No question that his mother’s 1997 death is still the primal wound in Harry’s now 38-year-old psyche, and the book’s most affecting passages show his 12-year-old self struggling to grieve in public view. He cried just once, at her graveside, then never again, and spent years clinging to the theory that she had simply gone into hiding.

He grew into an indifferent student and a recreational drug user, known variously as “the naughty one” and “the stupid one.” (What was he thinking when he wore a Nazi uniform to a costume party? “I wasn’t.”) Two combat stints gave him a measure of confidence before he settled into the surreal life of a royal — “this unending Truman Show in which I almost never carried money, never owned a car, never carried a house key, never once ordered anything online, never received a single box from Amazon, almost never traveled on the Underground.” Whatever relationships he forged couldn’t survive the full-court press of tabloid “paps” dogging his every step. “Royal fame,” he concluded, “was fancy captivity.”

Enter, as you know she must, Meghan.

By now, the stages of their affair are available to anyone who cares: the Instagram sighting, the dinner date, the week in a Botswana tent. So, too, is the mauling Markle received at the hands of British media, a toxic brew of racism and misogyny that too often, says Harry, went unchallenged by Buckingham Palace. No wonder, for Palace staff were either planting the stories or actively courting the reporters behind them. “Pa’s office, Willy’s office,” fumes Harry, “enabling these fiends, if not outright collaborating.”

“Darling boy,” his father counseled, “just don’t read it.” Not an option for Harry, who was, by his own admission, “undeniably addicted” to reading and raging at his own media coverage. But when he decided to step away from royal duties, the rage came back at him: William, according to one already well-publicized anecdote, grabbed him by the collar and knocked him to the ground. Stripped of their royal allowance and eventually their security detail, Harry and Meg fled first to Canada before settling in America, or, as Harry cheekily calls it, “the undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveler returns.”

Meghan and Harry made a fairy-tale escape. They still seem trapped.

So meet them in their current iteration: still gorgeous, parents to two gorgeous children — and also, the author tactfully concedes, drawing on “corporate partnerships” to “spotlight the causes we cared about, to tell the stories we felt were vital. And to pay for our security.” In a more rueful vein: “I love my Mother Country, and I love my family, and I always will. I just wish, at the second-darkest moment of my life, they’d both been there for me.”

Yet, in a perverse way, they were there for him, and he for them. The brand he and Meghan have so carefully nurtured is entirely dependent on the brand they so publicly cast off. With each morsel of palace scandal they lob into the news cycle, they feed the beast they deplore, and it will never end, and, for the Windsors’ sakes, can never end because that would mean our interest in them has run dry. One ends up almost longing for the days when royals just poisoned each other or waged civil war. If nothing else, they got it out of their systems.

Louis Bayard is the author of “The Pale Blue Eye” and “Jackie & Me.”

By Prince Harry the Duke of Sussex

Random House. 416 pp. $36

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Spare by Prince Harry: A chaotic but stylish memoir that sets fire to the royal family

His wife might be the natural on camera, but the duke of sussex hits his stride on paper in this breathtakingly frank book, article bookmarked.

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You might feel as if you’ve already read Prince Harry ’s memoir Spare by now. The virginity lost to a stallion trainer behind a pub. The dog bowl-smashing, necklace-ripping tussle with William. The constant calling out of his family briefing the press. This book doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents. But it’s also richly detailed and at times beautifully written; if Harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with some style.

Spare ’s ghostwriter JR Moehringer was behind tennis star Andre Agassi’s extraordinary memoir Open, and his choice as Harry’s collaborator was an early indication that the book would be no curling celebrity memoir. Even so, it is breathtakingly frank. His wife might be the natural on camera, but Harry seems to hit his stride on paper, his voice more authentic than the Californian inflections he slipped into while being interviewed with Meghan for their great soufflé of a Netflix docuseries (between the bombshells of Oprah and Spare , the streaming giant might be feeling justifiably short changed) even if at times his style is a little chaotic, written in a gallop of posh, staccato sentences that speak of “Ma”, “Pa”, “Willy”, and (yes) “todgers”.

Charles is less a father figure than a kind but emotionally distant uncle, who laughs in the wrong places when Harry performed in Much Ado About Nothing at Eton, and potters around Balmoral with his “wireless”. There is a disconnect between his words and deeds. He calls Harry “darling boy” but doesn’t ever hug him, even when delivering news of Diana’s death; he expresses joy at Harry’s birth to Diana but then goes straight off to see his “Other Woman” Camilla. “He’d always given the air of not being quite ready for parenthood – the responsibilities, the patience, the time,” Harry writes, but he is paradoxically an older Dad which “created problems, placed barriers between us”.

“Willy” is depicted as well-meaning but a little cold – and you get the distinct impression that they were never that close. Harry discovers his brother and Kate are engaged at the same time as everyone else. Their sibling rivalry is a “private olympiad” of petty grievances, from the size of their childhood bedrooms to ownership of causes: “I let you have veterans, why can’t you let me have African elephants and rhinos?” says William – who might also say that recollections vary. There is a whiff of Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway in Harry’s assertion that “there’s just as much truth in what I remember and how I remember it than there is in so-called objective facts”.

As a boy, he deflects grief over Diana’s death by convincing himself that “Mummy” has simply faked her death and gone into hiding. The most affecting piece of writing in the book is when, as an adult, he asks to see photos of her body in the wreckage of the Paris tunnel, and observes a “supernatural” halo of light created by the camera flashes: “within some of [which] were ghostly visages, and half visages, paps and reflected paps and refracted paps on all the smooth metal surfaces and glass windscreens”.

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A white-hot hatred of the press rages through the book – the media kills his mother, hounds him as a teen, ruins his army career, scares away girlfriends and tortures his wife. He fixates on a pair of paps nicknamed “Tweedle Dumb” and “Tweedle Dumber” and obsessively sets the record straight on decades-old stories, even one as innocuous as the claim he and William hung “Just Married” signs on Charles and Camilla’s wedding car. (Harry says he doesn’t believe this happened.)

In a row with his father and brother which bookends the memoir, Harry writes that Charles “hated [the press’s] hate, but oh how he loved their love… compulsively drawn to the elixir they offered him”. But his own fixation is compulsive too. In an online world his effort to correct every falsehood written about him looks like shouting at the sea. But there is humour in the book too, even if it’s of the squaddie variety – that account of his frostbitten penis after a trip to the North Pole culminates in an odd admission that he covered it in Elizabeth Arden and thought of his mother, who once used the cream.

Passages about army exploits and travels to Africa are worthy but a little bloated. More interesting are the rich accounts of gatherings at Balmoral, the strangely loving process of being “blooded” after stalking deer, the baths with brown running water, the Queen whipping up a salad dressing. His great aunt, Princess Margaret, giving him a Biro pen for Christmas.

Then along comes Meghan – her beauty “like a punch in the throat”. She is not just the new love of his life but his emotional life raft, one he fears the press is intent on sinking, like they did to his mother. The panic of losing her inflates between every line like a balloon. His family tells him to tough it out. You know what comes next.

So what makes him do it? Money? Revenge? A desire to emulate the Obamas – humanitarian power couple with matching Netflix and Spotify deals. But his book hardly adopts the “when they go low, we go high” ethos, and even sympathetic commentators across the pond are starting to grow weary of the Sussex confessional tour. Most likely was his desire to tell his truth (before Meghan inevitably tells hers in her own autobiography).

In his acknowledgements, Harry thanks Moehringer for persuading him that “memoir is a sacred obligation”. But for a prince raised in a golden goldfish bowl, isn’t privacy far more sacred, more precious? He has given up so much of it with Spare . I hope it’s worth it.

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What critics are saying about Prince Harry’s memoir ‘Spare’

Whether or not critics like the book has not impacted sales — it’s already a best seller.

By Margaret Darby

After months of anticipation, Prince Harry’s memoir, “Spare,” has officially hit the shelves — not to be mistaken with the widespread leaks from the book which surfaced last week, as reported by the Deseret News .

So far, critics have not gone easy on the memoir. The Guardian called the book “a flawed attempt to reclaim the narrative.”

Regardless of how critics feel about “Spare,” the book is a hit. According to The Washington Post , the memoir is already at the top of bestseller lists.

“As far as we know, the only books to have sold more in their first day are those starring the other Harry (Potter),” said the memoir’s publisher, per Sky News .

Here are the initial reviews from critics and fans on “Spare.”

First reactions to ‘Spare’

• “At once emotional and embittered, the royal memoir is mired in a paradox: drawing endless attention in an effort to renounce fame,” Alexandra Jacobs wrote for The New York Times .
• Sean Coughlan, a royal correspondent said “Spare” is “part confession, part rant and part love letter. In places it feels like the longest angry drunk text ever sent,” per the BBC .
• According to Lucy Pavia with the Independent , the book “sets fire to the royal family.” Pavis claims the book is “beautifully” written and “doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents.”
• “Harry comes across as honest and reflective, but also angry, thin-skinned, disoriented” Henry Mance wrote in the Financial Times .
• The London Times called the book a “400-page therapy session for mystic Harry,” wrote James Marriott. “Open the book and you discover quite a different Harry from the cool, square-jawed metrosexual Californian on the cover. This is a weirder, more complex Harry.”
• The Economist called the memoir an “ill-advised romp.”

Fan reactions to ‘Spare’

Fans have gone easier on the book than critics. Some fans are sympathetic to Harry and what he has gone through, while some think it’s time Harry practice a little gratitude and others simply shared lighthearted jokes about the memoir.

I'm fifty pages into "Spare" and it's so desperately sad: the tone is very different to how all the out-of-context quotes make it seem. Although he keeps making jokes - mainly self-deprecating - it just ACHES. — Caitlin Moran (@caitlinmoran) January 10, 2023

#PrinceHarry has the privilege and opportunities to have an amazing life. He has $100 Million in the bank, a wife and children and he wants us to go oh poor Harry he must speak his truth. He’s not 12, grow up and his invasion of his family’s privacy is creepy & sick. #Spare — The British Prince (@Freedom16356531) January 10, 2023

Pretty funny Harry is ridiculing Prince William’s “alarming baldness.” #Spare #BrotherBetrayal pic.twitter.com/ikzW1qr1J6 — DT Cahill (@DTCahill) January 10, 2023

#SpareUsHarry Anxiously awaiting Wills follow up Tell-Book in response to "Spare" pic.twitter.com/XXrGdf1pvh — Emily Harrison (@emharrison75) January 9, 2023

Royal Fights, the Infamous Nazi Costume, and Meghan: The Biggest Revelations in Prince Harry Memoir

By Tomás Mier

Prince Harry doesn’t hold back in his new memoir Spare , out Jan 10. As interest surrounding Harry, his upbringing, and his ever-evolving relationship with his family is at an all-time high, snippets from the memoir have already started making headlines in the days leading up to the release.

The book arrives as the couple has continued to open up about their experiences in the British monarchy. Most recently, the two detailed the origin of their relationship and the events that led to their controversial Royal exit in the Netflix docuseries Harry and Meghan . Harry is also planning to give televised interviews on ITV, 60 Minutes , and the Late Show with Stephen Colbert , in the coming days.

According to Google Trends, searches for “ Prince Harry  Memoir” and “Order Spare” spiked by more than 200% this week, while the book has shot to the top of  Amazon’s bestsellers list , days before its actual release date on Jan. 10.

Here are the biggest revelations from Spare , out Jan. 10:

Prince Harry killed 25 Taliban soldiers

Harry writes about his time serving in Afghanistan in the new book, revealing that while on the front lines, he killed 25 people during active duty. (During his ten years in the British military, he visited Afghanistan twice.)

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He added, “Among the many things I learned in the Armed Forces, one of the most important was to be accountable for my own actions.”

Harry once become “sloppily angry” at Meghan

While Prince Harry typically speaks only positively of his relationship with his wife, Meghan Markle , he opened up about a particularly difficult time in their relationship. Amid the craziness of their time in the Royal Family, he says he once became “sloppily angry” with his wife after he took something she said “the wrong way” during a conversation.

“Maybe the wine went to my head. Maybe the weeks of battling the press had worn me down. For some reason, when the conversation took an unexpected turn, I became touchy,” Harry wrote, per Us Weekly . “Then angry. Disproportionately, sloppily angry.”

“I was also just over-sensitive that night. I thought: ‘Why’s she having a go at me?’ I snapped at her, spoke to her harshly [and] cruelly,” he added. “As the words left my mouth, I could feel everything in the room come to a stop. The gravy stopped bubbling, the molecules of air stopped orbiting. Even Nina Simone seemed to pause.”

After yelling at her, Harry says Markle ended up in their bedroom, where she calmly, yet sternly, told him that she would never “stand for being spoke to like that.”

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“It came from somewhere deep inside, somewhere that needed to be excavated, and it was obvious that I could use some help with the job,” Harry explained. “‘I’ve tried therapy,’ I told her. ‘Willy told me to go. Never found the right person.’ [It] didn’t work. ‘No,’ she said softly. ‘Try again.’”

William and Kate told him to wear the infamous Nazi uniform

Remember when Prince Harry was on the cover of The Sun for wearing a Nazi uniform? Well, the Duke of Sussex is blaming his older brother William and his wife, Kate Middleton, for the decision that landed the Royal Family in scandal.

After being unsure what to wear to a Halloween party, “I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said,” Harry writes in an excerpt obtained by Page Six . And after he tried on the outfit in front of him, “They both howled. Worse than Willy’s leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point.”

Prince William physically attacked Harry over Meghan Markle

Among the revelations in the new book is that Prince Harry says he was attacked by his brother William during an incident at the Duke of Sussex’s London home back in 2019.

A leaked excerpt obtained by The Guardian described how William allegedly arrived at Harry’s home and called his wife Meghan Markle “rude” and “abrasive,” which Harry described as “parroting” tabloid press.

The Duke of Sussex defended his partner as the two exchanged insults. “He set down the water, called me another name, then came at me. It all happened so fast. So very fast… He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor,” recounts Harry in the book, per The Guardian . “I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out.”

Harry says William encouraged him to fight back, before the older brother looked “regretful” and later “apologized” for his actions. “(She) wasn’t that surprised, and wasn’t all that angry. She was terribly sad,” Harry said about the encounter.

Prince Harry’s penis had frostbite

“Pa was very interested, and sympathetic about the discomfort of my frost-nipped ears and cheeks,” he wrote, adding that he didn’t want to overshare to his family about his penis, per Page Six . “While the ears and cheeks were already healing, the todger wasn’t. It was becoming more of an issue by the day.’

Kate Middleton made Meghan Markle apologize for saying she had “baby Brain”

The girls were fighting. In one excerpt of the book obtained by NBC News , Prince Harry reveals that Kate Middleton made Meghan Markle apologize for suggesting she had “baby brain,” which refers to memory problems and concentration issues that occur during pregnancy.

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In Spare , Harry claims that Markle remembered having suggested her sister-in-law might have “baby brain” after she forgot something unimportant. (Prince William even got involved, pointed at Markle and called her rude, to which she replied, “Take your finger out of my face.”)

This story is being updated with details from Spare as they become available. It was last updated on Jan. 6 at 12:35 p.m. ET.

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‘Tits Up’ Aims to Show Breasts a Respect Long Overdue

The sociologist Sarah Thornton visits strip clubs, milk banks and cosmetic surgeons with the goal of shoring up appreciation for women’s breasts.

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Lucinda Rosenfeld, a novelist and essayist, is the author of five books, including “Class.”

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TITS UP: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us About Breasts, by Sarah Thornton

It’s a testament to the sociologist Sarah Thornton’s central thesis — women’s breasts are unjustly sexualized, trivialized and condescended to — that I expected her new book, “Tits Up,” to be a light read. In fact, her impassioned polemic makes a convincing case that the derogatory way Western culture views tits (Thornton contrasts her chosen slang with the relatively “silly” and “foolish” boobs ) helps perpetuate the patriarchy.

Breasts have been seen as “visible obstacles to equality, associated with nature and nurture rather than reason and power,” Thornton announces upfront. Over five, sometimes fascinating, sometimes frustrating chapters, each examining mammaries in a different context, “Tits Up” asks readers to reimagine the bosom, no matter its size and shape, as a site of empowerment and even divinity.

The author of a similarly discursive survey of the early 2000s art world , Thornton arrived at her new topic not entirely by choice. In 2018, after one too many stressful biopsies, she underwent a double mastectomy. But neither a fraught origin story nor Thornton’s argument that women are unfairly restrained by their mammalian status prevents “Tits Up” from being funny, too. Keen to make peace with her larger than expected implants — Thornton had requested more modest “lesbian yoga boobs” — she names her new pair Ernie and Bert.

The three of them soon hit the research road.

First stop: the Condor, a historic strip club in San Francisco, where Thornton interviews a racially and size-diverse group of strippers, who paint a relatively sunny portrait of a notoriously sleazy industry. Additional interviews with feminist sex activists and performance artists such as Annie Sprinkle — if you’re in need of a good laugh, Google “ Bosom Ballet ” — lead Thornton to conclude that, even when breasts are targets of overt objectification (after all, most patrons of topless bars are male), they might be thought of less as “sex toys” than as “salaried assistants.”

Feminists have been fighting about what’s now known as “sex work” for as long as feminism has been around. Thornton comes down squarely on the side of the workers. But she goes further than that. “I think the most fundamental issue inhibiting women’s autonomy — our right to choose what we do with our bodies — is the state’s policing of sex work,” she writes. “If some women can’t sell their bodies, then none of us actually own our bodies.” Reading these lines, I admit my first thought was, Huh? Should women’s ability to prostitute themselves really be the measure of our liberation?

But the chapter that follows, a cri de coeur on behalf of breastfeeding and the legacy of communal “allomothers” — women who nurse children who are not their own — seems to make a counterargument in favor of configuring breasts outside both capitalism and sexuality. After interviewing the women who run, provide and reap the benefits of a San Jose-based nonprofit milk “reservoir” (Thornton prefers the term to “bank”), she writes, “In a capitalist society where women’s breasts are commodified like no other body part, here their jugs are the key players in an economy that is not about money.”

It’s to Thornton’s credit that, her polemical tone notwithstanding, she is open-minded enough to entertain paradoxes. (And entertain she does.) While she despairs at the discouraging lingo that surrounds nursing — “milk letdown” comes in for particular condemnation — she admits to having felt conflicted while breastfeeding her own, now grown, children, insofar as the practice evoked for her the enervating specter of the selfless mother.

Semantics are at the heart of “Tits Up,” as Thornton rightly notes that the words we use inform the ideologies we subscribe to. But, again, the contradictions mount. Even as Thornton employs trans-activist-approved jargon such as “AMAB,” for assigned male at birth, and insists that both men and women have breasts, she draws the line at the term “chest feeding,” pointing out that “the expression obfuscates the highly gendered history of this maternal labor.”

Is it highly gendered or highly sexed? Either women’s lives are too much hampered by the fetishization and fear of their anatomy, or — paging Judith Butler — sexual difference is socially constructed and therefore, at least in theory, susceptible to change. I don’t quite see how these arguments can coexist.

Another research trip lands Thornton in the studio of a mass-market bra designer, where she decides that, although the brassiere is an impressive feat of engineering designed to make women feel safe, it’s past time we stopped hiding our nipples. In the operating room of a high-end plastic surgeon who performs augmentations, lifts and reductions, she concludes that breast alterations are not simply capitulations to normative beauty standards. Instead, such procedures might be understood in terms of female agency — as gestures that exist outside the logic of resistance or submission. Finally, she attends a neo-pagan retreat for women in the California redwoods, where she reflects on how alternative spiritual practices provide more space for aging female bodies — the kind of woman once referred to as a “crone” — and fantasizes half in jest about a world where saggy breasts are regarded as “sagacious.”

Drawing on her art history background, Thornton also leads us on an enlightening tour of female deities and their bosoms, including the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis (frequently depicted with multiple breasts); a Buddhist goddess of compassion, Guanyin (always portrayed as pancake flat); and the Virgin Mary, who, in portraits of her nursing baby Jesus, often appears to have only one boob. (Go figure.)

What does it all add up to? “Women have no federal right to breastfeed or to obtain an abortion, but we have the right to fake tits,” Thornton writes, noting that since 1998 health insurance companies have been required to pay for breast implants following medically necessary mastectomies. But what would a “federal right to breastfeed” look like, anyway? This declaration is among countless thought-provoking ones in this deceptively trenchant if inconsistently argued treatise. In any event, I eagerly await the sequel: “Asses Down”?

TITS UP : What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us About Breasts | By Sarah Thornton | Norton | 307 pp. | $28.99

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Prince Harry in U.K. High Court battle over downgraded security on visits to Britain

By Haley Ott

December 6, 2023 / 10:17 AM EST / CBS News

London —  Prince Harry, the Duke of Sussex, is challenging the U.K. government's decision to provide him with less police protection when he comes back for visits. The government decided to deny the duke the highest level of state-funded protection after he and his wife Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, stepped down as senior working members of the royal family in 2021. He lost an appeal earlier this year in which he sought permission to pay for the police protection independently.

Harry's lawyers argued in front of Britain's High Court that RAVEC, the committee that makes security decisions regarding the royals on behalf of Britain's Home Office, "should have considered the 'impact' that a successful attack on [Harry] would have, bearing in mind his status, background, and profile within The Royal Family — which he was born into and which he will have for the rest of his life - and his ongoing charity work and service to the public."

The committee should also have "considered, in particular, the impact on the UK's reputation of a successful attack on [Harry]," the duke's legal team said in written arguments presented Tuesday.

The prince's lawyers argued that if RAVEC had followed its own policies, it would have provided Harry with more robust security, in line with the security it provides some other VIPs.

A lawyer for the Home Office said the "bespoke" way in which Prince Harry's case was handled was appropriate and "reflected the very particular combination of circumstances in his case," according to The Guardian newspaper.

"It is judged to be right in principle that the allocation of finite public resources which results from protective security provided by the state be allocated to individuals who are acting in the interests of the state through their public role," the Home Office lawyer said.

Harry, whose mother Princess Diana was killed in a Paris car crash as her vehicle was chased by paparazzi, has a long-standing distrust of the media. He's argued that threats and hatred aimed at he and Meghan are evidence of their need for high-level police protection during visits to Britain.

The case was expected to wrap up by Thursday.

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Haley Ott is the CBS News Digital international reporter, based in the CBS News London bureau.

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The Searchers by Andy Beckett review – the legacy of the radical left

What do the careers of Diane Abbott, Tony Benn, Jeremy Corbyn, Ken Livingstone and John McDonnell tell us about political success?

“P ersistence,” writes Andy Beckett, “is one of the left’s qualities that its enemies like least.” These hair-shirted zealots spend countless hours meeting, rallying, consciousness-raising, drumming up meagre support for seemingly lost causes. While he was the Greater London Council leader, Ken Livingstone lived alone in a student bedsit, the centrepiece of his room a quarter-sized snooker table on which he would practise shots after a 14-hour working day. Such obsessiveness seems baffling to the unbeliever. Why, they wonder, doesn’t the left just give up?

This book offers an answer. “Leftwing politics,” Beckett claims, “is rarely the dead end its enemies would love it to be.” He begins in 1968, with Tony Benn ’s conversion from an on-message cabinet minister into a standard-bearer for radicalism. Benn’s reawakening coincided roughly with the coming to political age of four much younger figures – Livingstone, Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott – who went on to forge a new left with him. Beckett has talked to all five, and is broadly a sympathiser, but his account of their project, while vividly detailed and often gripping, is as likely to reveal the left’s vanities and shortcomings.

A fair-minded assessment is vital because, as Beckett says, much of what we know about these politicians is filtered through the hostile vested interests, from hedge fund owners to landlords, of the vastly unequal country that Britain has become. From Benn’s billing as “the most dangerous man in Britain” in the 70s to the racism and misogyny meted out to Abbott, leftwing politicians are always judged by different standards. Abuse and death threats are the ambient noise of their lives. The new left these five built together drew on diverse influences: the radical sects that emerged from the English civil war, Salvador Allende’s Chilean socialist experiment, even the philosophy of Pope John XXIII. It valued democratic participation as much as equality, and it thrived in unwelcoming habitats: Thatcherite and New Labourite London and Britain in the years after the Brexit vote. Its success lay, Beckett argues, in “its attentiveness to social, economic and cultural trends, to how Britons were actually living”.

The Corbyn that emerges here – affable, a good listener, a diligent Islington MP – is hard to square with the stubborn, querulous persona he presented in interviews as Labour leader. Beckett addresses the case against his tenure – the chaotic party organisation, the lukewarm campaigning for remain, the failure to tackle antisemitism – thoroughly and fairly. In the end, the most damning impression this book leaves is that Corbyn didn’t especially want to be leader, and was unprepared to make even minor tonal adjustments to address the unconverted. Before the 2015 leadership election, Corbyn’s son Seb told McDonnell that his dad was “worried that he might win”.

The five politicians seem split between those prepared to build alliances and make compromises to gain power (Livingstone, McDonnell) and those playing a much longer game who see electoral victory almost as a side issue (Benn, Corbyn, Abbott). “Elections are a platform,” Benn said on Desert Island Discs in 1989. “People see elections much too much in terms of the outcome.” He told his supporters that his narrow loss to Denis Healey in Labour’s deputy leadership contest in 1981 was “an enormous victory”. Corbyn, similarly, spent months after the catastrophic 2019 general election defeat insisting that his arguments had been vindicated.

With caveats, Beckett subscribes to this Bennite view that politics is as much about changing ways of seeing and thinking as vote-counting. The left, he argues, has won many invisible, incremental battles, from investment in public transport in London to shifts in cultural attitudes. Today, pamphlets on diversity issued by Livingstone’s GLC “read like standard memos from human resources”. True enough, although how much this has to do with the GLC, or even the left, is debatable.

Benn’s final appearances in this book find him on a speaking tour. Wearing a cardigan and sipping from a flask of tea on stage, he offers his already converted audience the reassuring sense that they are on the side of the angels. Surveying Benn’s transformation into alternative national treasure, hero-worshipped into harmlessness, one is forced to conclude that the outcome of elections is, in fact, quite important.

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