Prince Harry’s highly anticipated memoir is already breaking sales records as the tell-all book was finally released following a massive media blitz.
On its first day on shop shelves, Spare become the UK’s fastest selling non-fiction book ever, its publisher said.
“We always knew this book would fly but it is exceeding even our most bullish expectations,” Transworld Penguin Random House Managing Director Larry Finlay said in a statement.
“As far as we know, the only books to have sold more in their first day are those starring the other Harry (Potter).”
Some UK bookshops opened at midnight on Tuesday, January 10 (local time) to meet demand for the Duke of Sussex’s 416-page autobiography, and it is available in Australia in bookshops and online for delivery from Wednesday.
Over the past week, Spare has generated incendiary headlines with details of bitter family resentments, as well as Harry and his wife Meghan’s decision to give up their royal roles and move to California.
Ghostwritten by novelist JR Moehringer, the book explores Harry’s grief over the sudden death of his mother Diana in 1997, and his long-simmering resentment at his role as the royal “spare”, overshadowed by the “heir” – his older brother William, or Willy, as he refers to him.
He recounts arguments and a physical altercation with the Prince of Wales, reveals how he lost his virginity, and describes using cocaine and cannabis.
He also recounts urging his father not to marry Camilla, killing 25 people while serving with the British army in Afghanistan and that he only cried once after Diana’s death.
To promote the book, he made headlines on four TV networks, delivering extensive interviews to Britain’s ITV, CBS’s 60 Minutes, Good Morning America, with a fourth interview on Stephen Colbert’s late show set to air at 11.30pm US time on January 10.
He was spotted arriving with armed bodyguards to Colbert’s Manhattan studios in New York City for a pre-recorded interview on Monday, local time.
Ahead of the broadcast, members of the studio audience leaked photos to The Daily Mail of Harry and Colbert downing tequila shots.
Prince Harry, Stephen Colbert and some tequila. Photo: The Daily Mail
In interviews broadcast on Sunday and Monday, he accused members of the royal family of getting “into bed with the devil” to gain favourable tabloid coverage, singling out the Queen Consort Camilla’s efforts to rehabilitate her image with the British people after her long-time affair with his father, now King Charles III.
“That made her dangerous because of the connections that she was forging within the British press,” he told CBS.
Commentators say the book has plunged the monarchy into its biggest crisis since the days of the royal soap opera in the 1990s around the break-up of Charles’ marriage to Diana.
There has not yet been any official comment from Buckingham Palace.
Here are some of the more startling anecdotes, allegations and stories of Harry’s life, as seen through his lens.
Don’t ‘make my final years a misery’
In an extract leaked earlier this week, The Guardian says his father, then Prince Charles, stood between his two sons during a difficult meeting at Windsor Castle following the April 2021 funeral for their grandfather Prince Philip, the late Queen Elizabeth’s husband.
“Please, boys,” Harry quoted his father as saying, “don’t make my final years a misery.”
Meghan can communicate with seals
One night while having dinner on the north coast of Scotland, Charles told Harry and Meghan the story of selkies, sirens disguised as seals, and recommended that they sing to the seals to see whether they would respond, according to The Sydney Morning Herald‘s London bureau.
“While on the beach, the Sussexes saw the seals and Harry ran over to sing to them. He failed to get a response, but when his wife joined in they answered her,” he writes.
“Soon enough, an endless number of heads began to appear in every part of the water, responding to her song,” he writes, saying he thought at that moment that Meghan “really is magic”.
Prince Andrew – a personal assistant to the Queen?
Meghan met the Queen during a lunch in Windsor in 2016.
“After a moment Meg asked me something about the Queen’s assistant. I asked who she was talking about.
“‘That man holding the purse. That man who walked her to the door. That wasn’t her assistant? Who was it?’”
“That was her second son. Andrew … She definitely hadn’t Googled us,” Harry said, according to the SMH.
Jokes about Harry’s biological father
CNN who obtained a copy of the book, says Harry claims in his memoir that Charles once joked about who Harry’s father really is.
The prince explained his father “liked telling stories” and recounts his father making a joke about his mother Diana’s affair with Major James Hewitt.
Harry writes that his father would joke: “‘Who knows if I’m really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I’m even your real father? Maybe your real father is in Broadmoor, darling boy!”
Harry found it an “unfunny joke, given the rumour circulating just then that my actual father was one of Mummy’s former lovers: Major James Hewitt”.
“One cause of this rumour was Major Hewitt’s flaming ginger hair, but another cause was sadism. Tabloid readers were delighted by the idea that the younger child of Prince Charles wasn’t the child of Prince Charles,” Harry writes.
“Never mind that my mother didn’t meet Major Hewitt until long after I was born, the story was simply too good to drop.”
Of Mice and Men
Harry struggled with Shakespeare and French lessons at Eton, says the SMH.
But after reading Hamlet, he found comparisons with the tragedies in his own life.
“The piece of literature that I do remember liking and even enjoying is a short American novel Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck.
“Unlike Shakespeare, Steinbeck did not need a translator. He wrote in the vernacular, plain and simple. Better yet, it was brief. Of Mice and Men: One hundred and fifty little pages of nothing.
“And best of all: the argument was entertaining.”
The King’s one exercise for an old polo injury
“These exercises were the only effective remedy for the constant pain in Pa’s neck and back. Old polo injuries mostly.
“He’d perform them daily in just a pair of boxers propped against the door, or hanging from a bar like a skilled acrobat. If you set one little finger on the knob you hear him bark from the other side ‘no, no don’t open, please, don’t come in’,” Harry wrote, according to the SMH.
Harry views his grandmother lying in state
CNN reports Harry wrote about the moment he saw the Queen’s body inside a room at Balmoral Castle.
“I braced myself, went in. The room was dimly lit, unfamiliar – I’d been inside it only once in my life. I moved ahead uncertainly, and there she was. I stood, frozen, staring.
“I stared and stared. It was difficult, but I kept on, thinking how I’d regretted not seeing my mother at the end. Years of lamenting that lack of proof, postponing my grief for want of proof. Now I thought: Proof. Careful what you wish for.”
Kate’s ‘baby brain’
Meghan allegedly upset the Princess of Wales by saying she must have “baby brain” because of her hormones after she had given birth and during the run-up to the royal wedding in 2018.
CNN reports Harry describes a 2018 meeting with William and Kate at their residence where Kate demanded an apology from Meghan for offending her.
Harry went on to say that Meghan said she spoke to all her friends that way.
Harry recounted that the Prince of Wales called Meghan “rude” and pointed his finger, saying, “it’s not what’s done here in Britain,” to which Meghan reportedly replied: “Kindly take your finger out of my face.”
Losing virginity
Harry says he lost his virginity to “an older woman,” who he added “liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me not unlike a young stallion”, quotes CNN.
“Among the many things about it that were wrong: It happened in a grassy field behind a busy pub,” he writes.
‘Barbarity’ to get sons to walk behind Diana’s casket
The Telegraph also reports the book details claims of heated behind-the-scenes arguments between Diana’s brother, Earl Spencer, and the royal family about whether Harry, 12, and William, 15, should walk behind their mother’s coffin at her funeral.
The princes’ uncle “flew into a rage” at the idea, and said: “You cannot force these children to walk behind their mother’s coffin. It’s a barbarity!”
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