Spare

The memoir is arguably the most insightful royal book in a generation, yet still leaves readers with many questions about the monarchy unanswered.

For a full comparison of Standard and Premium Digital, click here. You'll enjoy access to several newsletters including FirstFT, a daily newsletter with the global stories you need to know as well as Editor's Choice, a weekly newsletter featuring the editor's favourite stories. Access our essential offering with over 600 journalists in 50+ countries covering markets, politics, business, tech and more.

An independent bookshop has gone viral for displaying Prince Harry's memoir Spare alongside author Bella Mackie's novel How to Kill Your Family.

people are making all sorts of wild assumptions and connections" next to an upside down face emoji. and "signed?" Twitter users turned to the comments section to react to the post, with replies including "who will sue first HRH or Ms Mackie?"

The controversial tell-all sold 400000 copies in Britain the day it was officially released, more than any other nonfiction title, according to the book's ...

[mistakenly put on shelves](https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2023/01/05/these-are-the-six-most-shocking-leaks-from-prince-harrys-upcoming-memoir/?sh=6c66c29e13c6) on Thursday in Spain, leading some of the memoir’s most shocking inclusions to leak days before the book’s official publication date. Harry defended himself in an interview with Good Morning America last week, saying his family leaked stories about Harry and Meghan first. [These Are The Six Most Shocking Leaks From Prince Harry’s Upcoming Memoir](https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2023/01/05/these-are-the-six-most-shocking-leaks-from-prince-harrys-upcoming-memoir/?sh=6c66c29e13c6) (Forbes) [Prince Harry Defends Netflix Doc And Media Appearances: ‘Silence Is Betrayal’](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2023/01/02/prince-harry-defends-netflix-doc-and-media-appearances-silence-is-betrayal/?sh=27bab6531168) (Forbes) [28 million households](https://www.forbes.com/sites/carlieporterfield/2022/12/13/harry--meghan-was-netflixs-largest-documentary-premiere-ever/?sh=3e6c6aca7e40) during the first week of streaming, the platform’s largest documentary premiere ever. In December, the pair released their Netflix series Harry & Meghan, which brought in views from To promote Spare, Harry has done interviews with both British and American media outlets, causing controversy among critics who have accused him of selling out his family.

The memoir, which includes claims Prince William attacked him, records figures of 400000 on its first day.

she would be heartbroken.” “I think she would be sad … “Not stopping us going back, but making it unsurvivable.”

Prince Harry's book, with sex, drugs and monarchy, reaches parts never seen before in a royal memoir.

He's back and forth to Africa like he was going a few stops on the Northern Line. Charles is seen padding around in his slippers, listening to his audio-books, obsessed with Shakespeare, wearing Dior scent and falling asleep at his desk. As a schoolboy, smoking cannabis with his friends, he watches the police outside there to guard him. Charles leaves notes for him trying to say nice things - but Harry questions why he couldn't say them in person. What's missing from the book is any sense of awareness of any wider context of the rest of the world outside. Harry says he watches the TV show Friends on a loop, identifying with the funny guy character of Chandler. Plenty of the book will get people irritated too, particularly its self-absorption. It's a long way from the commentary for Trooping the Colour. It's as if he has been blinded by the paparazzi flashlights. It's disarmingly frank and intimate - showing the sheer weirdness of his often isolated life. When he's in there one day he overhears shoppers debating whether he's gay. This royal appendage gets more lines than many of his relatives.

The shrieky, hysterical, pre-emptive, at times ominous reactions to Prince Harry's recent interviews and leaked snippets from his autobiography have revealed ...

To find peace, he needs to be far away from his dysfunctional clan and these seething isles. It is not bravado, just him bravely trying to come to terms with the objectification of the enemy by all those who go to war. It gave him the security and encouragement he never had in his family. There is no doubt that this is his revenge against what he sees as the enemy press. He matured when he joined the Army. And he is that young boy who had to withhold his raging emotions and walk behind her hearse. [his utterings on antiracism and unconscious bias](https://inews.co.uk/news/royal-comment-archie-skin-colour-racist-expert-harry-unconscious-bias-2073668?ico=in-line_link) – both issues he cares about – sound like lessons crammed, but unabsorbed. [the Queen Consort a schemer,](https://inews.co.uk/opinion/king-charles-will-have-a-red-line-and-harry-may-have-just-crossed-it-2073247?ico=in-line_link) who soon after Diana’s death “began to play the long game, a campaign aimed at marriage and eventually the Crown”. He takes for granted his inherited position and unspeakably privileged lifestyle. She is the heart of this book, “her devastating eyes, her vulnerable eyes, her childlike love of movies and music and clothes and sweets – and us. [Spare was released today](https://inews.co.uk/news/revelations-prince-harry-book-spare-william-2074533?ico=in-line_link), but the book and storyteller have already been utterly savaged. And to be fair, maybe I didn’t either.

From a childhood cut short to his simmering rage towards the British press via many grievances against his own family, Prince Harry's memoir is elegantly ...

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. 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. On the subject of the press his vitriol is astounding (of course I may be somewhat biased myself on this subject). 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. 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. 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. He’s not the only royal with a questionable attitude to the continent. 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 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. 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. Harry is trapped by the memory of his mother, who he describes in effusive, angelic terms as being “light, pure and radiant light”. The word “spare” is repeated again and again, so much so it seems a cudgel Harry beats himself with.

Moehringer, a former newspaper reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for feature writing, has spent years helping celebrities like Andre Agassi share their life ...

The anecdote about Harry’s frostbitten nether regions, for instance, segues into a moment of reflection about the invasiveness of the press. 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. The book is far from perfect. The tidbits were stripped of context. “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.” Whatever you think of the content, there’s no denying Spare is unflinching, introspective, and well-written. 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.” “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. Moehringer, fashioned the graveyard scene to evoke the Bard’s tragic tale of succession. [leaks from Prince Harry’s memoir Spare](https://time.com/6245103/prince-harry-spare-memoir-revelations/) before its Jan. The three men have agreed to a parley after Headlines about [Harry’s frostbitten penis](https://time.com/6245523/prince-harry-60-minutes-spare/) and his physical altercation with Prince William primed us to expect something akin to a Real Housewives episode.

Prince Harry's new memoir is certainly critical of his family, but when read in full, the level to which he is consumed by hatred of the press is apparent.

There is no doubt that Harry’s story is heartbreaking at times and it would be hard to come away from reading Spare without feeling some compassion for him. Spare stops short, however, of making a case that there is some kind of free-flow of information between the Palace and the media. She was the Daily Mirror's Royal Correspondent and is a frequent contributor to Good Morning America. “I fully accept that writing a book is feeding the beast,” he told ABC news. Having never fully subscribed to the view that Harry’s desire to write this book was motivated by money, the end of the manuscript made me think again on this point. Yet in trying to save himself from the persecution of false narratives, one wonders whether the Prince has also sacrificed himself. The reality is, the reason Harry’s book is so shocking is because we knew so little of it before. The book is full of anecdotes about journalists and photographers, most unnamed but it is clear that Harry has studied them all. He declares that it was “a bare-faced lie” that he was William’s best man. The portrayal of King Charles is also not that unflattering. [his declaration to ITV’s Tom Bradby](https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a42427296/prince-harry-itv-tom-bradby-interview-royal-family-racism/) that the press was entirely to blame when outrage was expressed at Lady Susan Hussey’s comments to Ngozi Fulani. With days of headlines having already planted [the key takeaways](https://www.townandcountrymag.com/society/tradition/a42407949/prince-harry-spare-biggest-revelations/) firmly in people’s minds, reading the whole thing was always going to be a journey punctuated by familiar landmarks.