Spare book by Prince Harry The Duke of Sussex

It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother?s coffin as the world watched in sorrow?and horror. As Diana, Princess of Wales, was laid to rest, billions wondered what the princes must be thinking and feeling?and how their lives would play out from that point on.

KShs 3,650.00

In stock

Description

Spare by Prince Harry The Duke of Sussex

It was one of the most searing images of the twentieth century: two young boys, two princes, walking behind their mother?s coffin as the world watched in sorrow?and horror. As Diana, Princess of Wales, was laid to rest, billions wondered what the princes must be thinking and feeling?and how their lives would play out from that point on.

For Harry, this is that story at last.

With its raw, unflinching honesty,?Spare?is a landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination, and hard-won wisdom about the eternal power of love over grief.

This must be the strangest book ever written by a royal.
Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare, is part confession, part rant and part love letter. In places it feels like the longest angry drunk text ever sent.
It’s the view from inside what he calls a “surreal fishbowl” and “unending Truman Show”.
It’s disarmingly frank and intimate – showing the sheer weirdness of his often isolated life. And it’s the small details, rather than the set-piece moments, that give a glimpse of how little we really knew.
There are glimpses of him as a royal stoner, smoking a joint after dinner and worrying the smoke was going to blow over to his elderly neighbour the Duke of Kent.
What other royal recollection would cover losing his virginity behind a pub, or go into such prolonged detail about a frost-bitten penis? This royal appendage gets more lines than many of his relatives. Maybe there should be a spoiler alert for the special cushion that’s made.
He was also keenly conscious of girls with “throne syndrome”, who would be “visibly fitting herself with a crown the moment she shook my hand”.
Or there’s the story about when he’s in Buckingham Palace during the Golden Jubilee concert and listening to Brian May playing on the roof – and notices his grandmother Queen Elizabeth is wearing earplugs.
His pre-Meghan life in London was ostensibly full of luxury, but it also feels as though he was undercover in his own life.
Harry suffered from appalling panic attacks, awful for anyone, but debilitating for someone expected to speak and appear in public.
He describes his lonely life at home, self-medicating with psychedelic drugs, drying his clothes on a radiator and planning shopping trips like military raids, to be carried out in disguise and at speed.
He doesn’t have an Amazon account, but he hits TK Maxx for clothes, and carries out a weekly food shop in a supermarket, rehearsing exactly where to find his favourite salmon and yoghurts. When he’s in there one day he overhears shoppers debating whether he’s gay.
But it’s a profoundly odd life, moving suddenly between this lack of glamour to time with the international jet set.
Harry says he watches the TV show Friends on a loop, identifying with the funny guy character of Chandler. But then on a trip to the US he is at a party with Courtney Cox, the actress who plays Chandler’s on-screen wife, Monica.
And this really is a trip, because he ends up taking hallucinogenic drugs and watches a pedal-bin coming to life. It’s a long way from the commentary for Trooping the Colour.
The ghost-written work is a fast-paced, quickfire account, looking out from the inside, always scratchily aware of the bodyguards outside the door and the cameras waiting to catch him. As a schoolboy, smoking cannabis with his friends, he watches the police outside there to guard him.
At the very centre of this story, permeating almost every page, is the huge trauma that seems to have distorted the rest of his life – the death of his mother Princess Diana.
He adored her unreservedly and an overwhelming sense of unresolved grief is at the hub of all his other anxieties, like spokes on a wheel.
He really, really hates the press, blaming them for chasing his mother so relentlessly, including in the events leading to her death in Paris, with Harry returning obsessively to the scene of the car accident.
His anger at the news media is wide ranging, but Rupert Murdoch is singled out in particular and one of his executives is only described in anagram form, so much is his allergic reaction.
The rows with his brother Prince William are often framed by references to the closeness they had previously had with their mother.
Spare by Prince Harry The Duke of Sussex

Additional information

Weight 0.9 kg