Spare reviewed: Harry is completely disingenuous – or an idiot

A surprising number of royal personages have published books under their own names, and sometimes they have even been written by the purported authors. The first, I think, was the Eikon Basilike, published shortly after Charles I’s execution and presented as his account of himself and of events. The authorship of this highly effective piece of propaganda has been questioned, but its simple, direct, haughty tone is very similar to the king’s recorded speech at his trial. After Prince Albert’s death, Queen Victoria published two journals of her life in the Highlands. We know that she was an enchantingly vivid writer from her diaries and letters, with a novelist’s ear for dialogue. (Lord Melbourne’s debauched, drawling conversation is beautifully captured in the single volume of her diary that Princess Beatrice didn’t get around to editing.) Publication, in the Highland volumes, put a restraint on her lively prose; but they still show how much pleasure she took in talking to people in remote places who had no idea who she was. Disraeli’s amusingly oily opening in an audience, ‘We authors, ma’am…’, is not as ridiculous as you might think.

There have been others since. I recommend a popular success of the 1950s, My Memories of Six Reigns by Princess Marie Louise, the granddaughter, through Princess Helena, of Queen Victoria. She can’t really write (‘Here I think I must relate an amusing remark my mother made’), but she is that rare thing, a bore who is not at all interested in talking about herself (unlike the author under present consideration). Her book is a mine of stunningly inconsequential tales – like Queen Victoria snobbishly telling a religious lady-in-waiting that when she died she would not receive the prophet Abraham.

The Duke of Windsor published an autobiography, A King’s Story, which rather demonstrates the factors preventing royalty from writing well.