So too is the description of the older woman to whom he lost his virginity: ‘She liked horses, quite a lot, and treated me not unlike a young stallion. An anecdote about a friend who makes him ‘a bespoke cock cushion sewn from pieces of the softest fleece’ to prevent frostbite on a trip to the South Pole is peak posh porno. Moehringer) has concocted a voice that combines Jilly Cooper and ‘Normal Bloke’. Throughout Spare, Harry comes across as remarkably un-self-aware and desperate to be liked, an unsettling psychological state underpinned by the strangeness of the prose. He also complains heartily about being the constitutionally less important brother: Harry got the smaller room at Balmoral as a child (‘Willy’ got the room with the ‘good-sized basin’) in his twenties he was given a mere single floor of Kensington Palace on ‘the lower ground floor’ William unfairly claimed the entire continent of Africa for public displays of do-gooding, despite knowing how many gap years Harry had taken in Lesotho. Later, he condemns the treatment of Meghan Markle by the media and his family. Harry is wounded by his mother’s death, which he blames on the press. The book compiles a litany of grievances that range from the profound to the petty. What do you get when you combine a disgruntled prince, the mother of all Oedipal complexes and a ghost-written memoir? The answer, of course, is Spare, Prince Harry’s tour de force of royal ressentiment (wrapped up in a very millennial tale). Or why ressentiment is the prevailing moral attitude of the day

Spare review