As read by Tim Teeman, Tom Sykes, Katie Baker, Kevin Fallon, Helen Holmes, Matt Young, Kate Briquelet, Brooke Leigh Howard, Rachel Olding, Danika Fears, Malcolm Jones, Madeline Roth.

Prince Harry opens his memoir, Spare, with a quote from Faulkner: “The past is never dead. It’s not even passed.” However he admits, just a few pages in, that he discovered it “on brainyquote.com.” What follows is a rollercoaster ride of revelations and relentless royal dish.

As well as all that has been divulged in countless articles and leaks already, Harry begins by revealing King Charles in an unfamiliar pose—in boxer shorts at Balmoral, doing headstands.

Harry reveals that he and brother Prince William always bowed to a statue of Queen Victoria on the second floor at Balmoral, having been “told to do so.” A risk of entering a “wrong door” at the Scottish castle was finding his father, “doing his head stands. Prescribed by his physio, these exercises were the only effective remedy for the constant pain in Pa’s neck and back. Old polo injuries, mostly. He performed them daily, in just a pair of boxers, propped against the door, hanging from a bar like a skilled acrobat.”

In an early recognition of his status, Harry says that at Balmoral he and William shared a room, saying William “had the larger half, with a double bed, a good size basin, a cabinet with mirrored doors, a beautiful window looking down on the courtyard, the fountain, the bronze statue of a roe deer buck. My half of the room was far smaller. Less luxurious. I never asked why. I didn’t care. But I also didn’t need to ask. Two years older than me, Willie was the Heir, whereas I was the Spare.”

And so the book begins as it means to go on: a blunt indictment of what Harry sees as his inherently lower position within the royal family that has impacted every part of his life.

He says that on the day of his birth his father told his mother: “Wonderful! Now you’ve given me an Heir and a Spare—my work is done.” Harry says the comment was “presumably” a joke but adds that, “minutes after delivering this bit of high comedy,” his father went off to meet “his girlfriend. So. Many a true word spoken in jest.”

“Emotion. Drama. Pain.”

Harry describes drifting off to sleep on the evening of August 30, 1997, before waking to find his father at the end of his bed, who tells him, “Darling boy, mummy has been in a car crash.” Harry writes, “I remember thinking: crash… Okay. But she’s alright? Yes?”

However his father then says, “There were complications. Mummy was quite badly injured and taken to hospital, darling boy.”

Harry says, “He always called me darling boy but he was saying it quite a lot now. His voice was soft. He was in shock, it seemed.”

Charles finally broke the news of Diana’s death to Harry by saying, “They tried, darling boy. I’m afraid she didn’t make it.”

Harry describes the morning of his mother’s death, saying that the family went to church as usual for a Sunday, but that he can remember very little about it.

He says that on the way home, “It was suggested that we stop. People had been gathering all morning outside the front gates, some had begun leaving things. Stuffed animals, flowers, cards. Acknowledgement should be made.”

He says that as he began to hear the “rhythmic clicking” of photographers he reached for his father’s hand, “for comfort,” then “cursed” himself “because that gesture just set off an explosion of clicks. I’ve given them exactly what they wanted. Emotion. Drama. Pain. They fired and fired and fired.”

His hatred of the media is the primary theme of the book, alongside the dysfunction of his own family, and his fractured relations with his father and brother.

As already reported by The Daily Beast, Harry writes about thinking Diana had staged her own death, and—truly alive—she would later be reunited with her two sons.

In a grim detail he says that his aunt Sarah McCorquodale handed him and William “two tiny blue boxes“ which contained Diana’s hair. He writes, “Aunt Sarah explained that, while in Paris, she’d clipped two locks from Mummy’s head. So there it was. Proof. She’s really gone.”

“I wasn’t Camilla’s biggest hurdle”

The seeds of royal rebellion were sown early. Harry’s history teacher at Ludgrove, named Mr. Hughes-Games, admonished Harry for not knowing anything about his family history; Harry also says he didn’t care to know anything about his ancestors.

Harry says Charles never spoke to him about James Hewitt, contrary to many profiles and biographies which say they had a heart-to-heart about the rumor that Hewitt was Harry’s father, which is patently false, Harry says.

Before they were officially introduced to their father’s mistress after Diana went “missing,” Harry says William once bumped into Camilla in the Palace. Harry says during his first formal introduction to Camilla, they were both “calm or bored.” “Neither of us much fretted about the other’s opinion. She wasn’t my mother, and I wasn’t her biggest hurdle. In other words, I wasn’t the Heir.”

In subsequent interviews this week, Harry has called Camilla both a “dangerous” schemer willing to leave “bodies in the street” to secure her royal position, while saying he has “compassion” for her.

Harry reveals Charles has a ratty old teddy bear called Teddy, and that William ignored him as a kid. On a hunting trip to Africa, a guide shoves Harry’s head into the carcass of a dead animal as part of a “blooding ritual.” A close encounter with a leopard in Botswana that passes near to the camp and Harry takes it as a sign from Diana that: “All is well. And all will be well.”

“Rehabber Kooks—infected pustule on the arse of humanity”

Harry talks about Club H, a place he could drink and let his hair down at his dad’s country pile, Highgrove, and of losing his virginity, as has been widely reported.

“Inglorious episode, with an older woman. She 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. Among the many things about it that were wrong: It happened in a grassy field behind a busy pub.”

He reserves particular scorn for one journalist who seems to be dead-set on pursuing him at all costs—anagram “Rehabber Kooks,” who seems very likely to be Rebekah Brooks, former editor of the News of the World and the Sun and now CEO of News UK (and tipped to take over the entire Murdoch empire)—as “an infected pustule on the arse of humanity, plus a shit excuse for a journalist.”

Charles and Camilla’s spin doctor decided to collude with Brooks, Harry writes, and throw the teenage Harry under the tabloid bus in order to “bolster the sagging reputation of Pa… No more the unfaithful husband, Pa would now be presented to the world as the harried single dad coping with a drug-addled child.”

The tabloid, Harry says, invented a story that he’d gone to rehab. He was furious when the story landed: “I felt heartbroken at the idea that this had been partly the work of my own family, my own father and future stepmother. They’d abetted this nonsense. For what? To make their own lives a bit easier.”

Harry also talks about the late Princess Margaret, another Spare as any Crown fan will remember, watching the powers-that-be separate her and her sister, Queen Elizabeth, early in their lives.

Harry finds “Margo” cold and intimidating with a scowl that could kill any house plant. One Christmas she gave him a biro as a gift. “It wasn’t just any biro, she pointed out. It had a tiny rubber fish wrapped around it… I told myself: That is cold-blooded.”

“Now and then, as I grew older, it struck me that Aunt Margo and I should’ve been friends,” Harry writes. “We had so much in common. Two Spares. Her relationship with Granny wasn’t an exact analogue of mine with Willy, but pretty close. The simmering rivalry, the intense competition (driven largely by the older sibling), it all looked familiar.”

“Cocaine didn’t make me particularly happy”

Harry writes about taking cocaine, and denying to a courtier that he had done so, despite press reports saying he had. “It wasn’t much fun, and it didn’t make me particularly happy as it seemed to make everyone around me, but it did make me feel different, and that was the main goal. Different. I was a deeply unhappy 17-year-old boy willing to try almost anything that would alter the status quo. That was what I told myself anyway. Back then, I could lie to myself as effortlessly as I’d lied to that courtier.”

Harry outlines his struggle to find purpose; he was not academic (saying the press cast him as “Prince Thicko”), and by “process of elimination” decided on the army as a career. He worked on a farm in Australia until the tabloids discovered him there, and then—on returning home—slept with a “page-three girl” (the famed topless models of the Sun) which led to more “nauseating,” snobbish press coverage.

His girlfriend Chelsy Davy “seemed immune to that common affliction sometimes called throne syndrome. It was similar to the effect that actors and musicians have on people, except with actors and musicians, the root cause is talent. I had no talent‚ so I’d been told, again and again—and thus all reactions to me had nothing to do with me. They were down to my family, my title, and consequently, they always embarrassed me, because they were so unearned. I’d always wanted to know what it might be like to meet a woman and not have her eyes widen at the mention of my title, but instead to widen them myself, using my mind, my heart. With Chelsy that seemed a real possibility…she was remarkably incurious.”

“Camilla sacrificed me on her personal PR altar”

Harry writes that he welcomed Charles and Camilla’s announcement they would marry, even if the ceremony was delayed. “Other than feeling sorry for them, I couldn’t help but think that some force in the universe (Mummy?) was blocking rather than blessing their union. Maybe the universe delays what it disapproves of?”

Still, “when the wedding did finally take place—without Granny, who chose not to attend—it was almost cathartic for everyone, even me…I did sneak several long peeks at the groom and the bride and each time I thought: Good for you. Though, also: Goodbye. I knew without question that this marriage would take Pa away from us…I didn’t relish losing a second parent, and I had complex feelings about gaining a step-parent who, I believed, had recently sacrificed me on her personal PR altar. But I saw Pa’s smile and it was hard to argue with that, and harder still to deny the cause: Camilla. I wanted so many things, but I was surprised to discover at their wedding that one of the things I wanted most, still, was for my father to be happy. In a funny way I even wanted Camilla to be happy. Maybe she’d be less dangerous if she was happy?”

Harry goes on to write about things already leaked and reported—his Nazi costume, allegedly greenlit and encouraged by William and Kate, and seeing photographs of his dead mother taken—as well as his army career, and ongoing paranoia he and William had about who was leaking stories about them to the press. Harry said he would rather be in a warzone than in Fleet Street’s sights. “What a relief it will be, I thought, to be in a proper war zone, where none of this is part of my daily calculus. Please, put me on a battlefield where there are clear rules of engagement. Where there’s some sense of honor.”

As it was, fighting in Iraq, Harry writes about himself becoming a target for insurgents to kidnap, torture, or kill. Upon returning to Britain, his partying became extreme, and the ever-present paparazzi he compared to Iraqi insurgents. “The paps had always been grotesque people, but as I reached maturity they were worse. You could see it in their eyes, their body language. They were more emboldened, more radicalized, just as young men in Iraq had been radicalized. Their mullahs were editors…”

As has been reported, William and Harry went to where their mother died in Paris.

Harry writes about finding purpose in Africa, of meeting people in real need “humbling” him, and of his frostbitten penis, as a result of Arctic travels just before Prince William’s wedding to Kate Middleton. The Sussex todger is still icy and painful during the ceremony. Harry is also massively hungover and freaked out being back at Westminster Abbey where his mother’s funeral service was. He can’t look at any of his nearest and dearest in case he bursts into tears.

Harry: I was Chandler in ‘Friends’

Late summer of 2013, Harry was having “terrifying panic attacks” and lethargy. Putting on a suit in the morning would trigger the panic attacks. He began to fear “all public venues” and started staying at home. He watched a lot of Friends and decided he was “a Chandler.”

He loved the show. Describing his bachelor lifestyle, he writes he did his own laundry, and folded his underwear while watching the show. For his everyday clothes he went to T.K. Maxx, liked Gap and J Crew.

He writes that he stopped going out in 2015, but still watched Friends, then would smoke a joint and go to bed early. “Solitary life. Strange life. I felt lonely, but lonely was panicky. … I was an agoraphobe.”

One therapist said he was suffering from post-traumatic stress, and that rang a bell. He also started meditating and taking psychedelics. “I’d experimented with them over the years, for fun, but now I’d begun to use them therapeutically, medicinally.”

In 2016 he went back to America and ended up staying at Courteney Cox’s house, who was a friend of a friend. Was thrilled “as a Friends fanatic.” But, “She was Monica. And I was a Chandler. I wondered if I’d ever work up the courage to tell her. Was there enough tequila in California to get me that brave?”

During a party at Cox’s, he met an actor from Batman (but doesn’t say who). At that party, he took mushrooms and washed them down with tequila. This is the bathroom shrooms story where the toilet became a head. The next day, there was another party with more tequila and more mushrooms. He ended the night by staring at the moon, which was speaking to him and telling him that “the year ahead would be good” and that there would be “something special” and “big.”

Maybe even someone who would be there for him, when the rain starts to pour.

“The King lived here, you say? Really?”

The book is intriguing as a kind of inside report on incidents that became such well-known tabloid fodder. Harry writes about the infamous time in Las Vegas where he was photographed nude after a wild night out. His “sense of guilt and shame made it hard at moments to draw a clean breath.” He fled to Balmoral, where his dad was “gentle” and “bemused” about it. Harry was relieved his bodyguards weren’t fired over it.

Deployed in Afghanistan, after he kills motorbike-riding Taliban soldiers, a friend asks, “Did it factor into your feeling that these killers were on motorbikes? The chosen vehicle of paps all over the world.” He “couldn’t say” that “not one particle” of him was thinking about the bikes that chased him, and “one Mercedes into a Paris tunnel.”

As has been reported, Harry killed 25 people while deployed. “It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed.” “They were chess pieces removed from the board, Bads taken away before they could kill Goods.” His questions about the war were never moral and the only shots he thought twice about were the ones he “hadn’t taken.”

Harry credits ex Cressida Bonas with performing “a miracle, opening me up, releasing suppressed emotions” during their relationship.

One night she asked about his mother. “Her tone was just the right blend of curiosity and compassion.” Harry started crying and told her, “This is the first time I’ve been able to cry about my mum since the burial… She was the first person to help me across that barrier, to help me unleash the tears. It was cathartic, it accelerated our bond, and added an element rare in past relationships: immense gratitude. I was indebted to Cress, and that was the reason why, when we got home from Kazakhstan, I felt so miserable, because at some point during that ski trip I’d realized that we weren’t a match.” He drove over to see Cress and broke up with her. “Damn, I thought. She helped me cry. And now I’m leaving her in tears.”

On a trip to America for his friend Guy Pelly’s wedding. Harry toured Graceland and was super-unimpressed. “Dark, claustrophobic. I walked around saying: The King lived here, you say? Really?”

The wedding made him think, “When’s it going to be my turn? The one person who might want it most, to be married, to have a family, and it’s never going to happen. More than a little petulantly, I thought: It’s just not fair of the universe.”

Having left the army to be a full-time royal, Harry read the stories of William being lazy “which was obscene, grossly unfair, because he was busy having children and raising a family.”

“He did as much as Pa wanted him to do, and sometimes that wasn’t much, because Pa and Camilla didn’t want Willy and Kate getting loads of publicity. Pa and Camilla didn’t like Willy and Kate drawing attention away from them or their causes. They’d openly scolded Willy about it many times. Willy told me that both he and Kate felt trapped, and unfairly persecuted, by the press and by Pa and Camilla.”

Kate and William were big fans of “Suits”

Harry says he and Meghan began messaging each other on July 1, 2016—what would have been his mom’s 55th birthday. In their meet, which Harry writes about suitably cutely, he talks about traveling to Africa together, a freaky moment where his phone is bust and he is not able to contact her, and Will and Kate’s shock when Harry reveals he is dating Meghan.

They “explained that they were regular—nay, religious—viewers of Suits. They barraged me with questions…overall what I told them was heavily redacted. I just didn’t want to give away too much. I also said I couldn’t wait for them to meet her, that I looked forward to the four of us spending lots of time together, and I confessed, for the umpteenth time, that this had long been my dream—to join them with an equal partner. To become a foursome. I’d said this to Willy so many times and he’d always reply: ‘It might not happen, Harold! And you’ve got to be OK with that.’ Now I felt that it was going to happen, and I told him so—but he still said to slow down. ‘She’s an American actress after all, Harold. Anything might happen.’ I nodded, a bit hurt. Then hugged him and Kate and left.”

Meghan meets Queen Elizabeth very early, does a flawless curtsey, declines to discuss Donald Trump, and scores major points when she says she’s been working in Canada— part of the Commonwealth. Meghan also meets William, hugs him, freaks him out. Both William and Charles are furious when Harry issues a statement decrying racism, sexism and harassment in the initial media coverage and online comment around Meghan. “Pa and Willy were furious. They gave me an earful. My statement made them look bad, they both said. Because they’d never put out a statement for their girlfriends or wives when they were being harassed.”

Harry reveals he warned Meghan before she took a trip to India for World Vision that she shouldn’t take a photo in front of the Taj Mahal. “I’d explained that my mother had posed for a photo there, and it had become iconic, and I didn’t want anyone thinking Meg was trying to mimic my mother. Meg had never heard of this photo, and found the whole thing baffling.”

Kate: “I know, Meghan, that I was the one that made you cry”

In the run-up to the wedding, Kate and Meghan fell out over what has become an endless saga of who said what about bridesmaid dresses.

Post-wedding, Harry conveys an image of them being hunted by the media, and frozen out by the family, although Meghan tells him of her first joint engagement with the queen: “We bonded! The queen and I really bonded! We talked about how much I wanted to be a mum and she told me the best way to induce labour was a good bumpy car ride! I told her I’d remember that when the time came.”

There are excruciating meetings where Harry and Meghan and Kate and William try to get their relationship back on track. William and Kate are upset that they did not receive Easter presents from Harry and Meghan.

Harry perceptively notes: “None of this airing of grievances was doing us any good, I felt. We weren’t getting anywhere.”

Kate tells Meghan she owes her an apology over Meghan saying she may have “baby brain”: “You hurt my feelings Meghan… I told you I couldn’t remember something and you told me it was my hormones… We’re not close enough for you to talk about my hormones.”

As has been reported William told Meghan she was being “rude,” and Meghan told him not to point at her.

“Was this really happening?” Harry writes. “Had it actually come to this? Shouting at each other about place cards and hormones?”

Harry does not address the bullying allegations against Meghan directly, but says, “Team Cambridge versus Team Sussex took shape,” with “rivalry, and competing agendas poisoning the atmosphere… Nerves were shattering, people were sniping… more than once a staff member slumped across their desk and wept.”

When the story breaks that Meghan made Kate cry over the bridesmaid dresses, Meghan says to her husband, “Haz, I made her cry? I made HER cry?” In December 2018, at another “summit” between the couples, Kate allegedly says to Meghan: “I know, Meghan, that I was the one that made you cry.”

Meghan asked what was being done to correct the story in public.

Harry writes that he realized that nothing would be done: nothing could “happen to embarrass the future queen.” William confesses that he told Charles and Camilla about the beef between the couples, and although it is not stated the unspoken source of the leak is implied to be him or Camilla.

“I was a stranger to my older brother”

In January 2019, Harry recalls Meghan saying she felt suicidal, then a letter she wrote to her father was leaked to the Mail, Harry watching his wife’s mood deteriorate even further. William visited, and shoves him—now infamously—on to the dog bowl. There is joy when Archie is born, with Harry transfixed by the miracle of life.

There is more joy when the couple go to chill at Elton John and David Furnish’s home in the South of France, until Elton tells Harry that the Daily Mail will serialize his memoir, pointing out, “I want people to read it!” Harry is furious that Elton is dealing with “the very people who’ve made your life miserable,” but then says he will always love Elton.

Back home, Harry does battle with three terrifying-sounding courtiers, nicknamed the Bee, the Fly, and the Wasp, who he sees as scheming for ever more control around an ailing queen. Harry then launched three lawsuits against British newspapers, which his family does not not support.

The queen and Charles called an emergency meeting with Harry, the Bee, and the Wasp to confront him for making their relationship with the media “complicated” because of the lawsuits. Harry reminded them many family members, the queen included, had sued the press. Why was this different? Plus, he and Meghan had been asking for their protection constantly, and they did nothing to help. “You’re doing a disservice to yourselves by not protecting my wife.”

William and Harry viciously fight by text, with William accusing Harry of being “brainwashed” by therapy. “I was a stranger to my older brother,” Harry writes.

Next came a briefly blissful sojourn to Vancouver Island, Canada, until the media found Harry and Meghan—although the experience, Harry says, gave him and Meghan an opportunity to see life outside the royal fishbowl. The idea of leaving their royal roles was born.

Exit strategy

Harry describes in great detail the alleged skullduggery and briefing and leaking against him and Meghan planning their royal exit. Finally, he recalls the “Sandringham Summit” that played out with the world’s media agog at every machination. Harry writes that the queen, Charles, William, the Bee, and the Wasp were all at the meeting. William was annoyed that he was being accused in the papers of bullying Harry and Meghan out of the family.

There were five options, Harry writes. Option 1 was the status quo. Option 5 was full severance from the family, royal duties, and security. Retaining security was paramount to Harry, to prevent “another untimely death.” Everyone Harry had consulted recommended Option 3: living elsewhere part of the year, continuing their work, and retaining security. The family pushed for Option 1, and said, barring that, they’d only accept Option 5. They had even already drafted an Option 5 statement to the public, without consulting Harry, he writes.

For Harry, keeping security was paramount, especially given the viciousness of what had been said against Meghan.

The Palace head of security told Harry that the threat level for them “was still higher for that of nearly every other royal, equal to that assigned the Queen.” As Harry trying to figure out hiring his own security, the Palace directed him to a firm that quoted him a price of “six million a year.”

In the midst of all this, Harry’s old friend/ex Caroline Flack took her own life. “She couldn’t stand it any more, apparently. The relentless abuse at the hands of the press, year after year. I felt so awful for her family. I remembered how they’d all suffered for her mortal sin of going out with me.”

The reason Tyler Perry offered them his house to stay in during the pandemic was “my mother,” Perry told them in a FaceTime call. “My mother loved your mother.” After Diana visited Harlem, “She could do no wrong in Maxine Perry’s book.”

In the house, Archie became obsessed with a painting of a scene from ancient Rome. Finally, after Archie kept staring at it, Meghan noticed the nameplate on the frame: “Goddess of the hunt. Diana.” When they moved to their Santa Barbara house after the press discovered they were at Tyler Perry’s, the move only took hours. “Everything we owned fit in 13 suitcases.”

After Meghan suffered her miscarriage, in the midst of the stress of preparing for the tabloid trial, they buried their unborn child in a tiny package under a banyan tree.

The brothers, as has been widely reported, had another physical altercation after Prince Philip’s funeral.

After their daughter Lilibet was born and they were home, Meghan told Harry that she’s never been more in love with him. She jotted notes in a journal that she showed him: “She said: That was everything…She said: That is a man…My love. She said: That is not a Spare.”

And that moment of cheer—after hundreds of pages of tumult—is the last line of the book.