Royal revelations.

THE first revelation is his name. It is not Harry. He was christened Henry Charles Albert David. His memoirs Spare appear unAder his more popular name: Prince Harry.

Spare is a wordy remonstrance by Harry against fate for being the second born after Prince William and against his family for their lack of understanding of his errant personality, and later ungenerous slights against his wife Meghan.

The book has been ghostwritten by J.R. Moehringer. After reading more than 400 pages of Harry's stream of consciousness revelations and grievances, the reader might be forgiven for suspecting that many persons added their own drops of acid to the ink.

His American editors, for one. They encourage Harry to include gratuitous references to the late Duchess of Windsor - 'the notorious Wallis Simpson', and to him standing with his father Charles and elder brother William in the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore (Windsor), 'our feet almost on top of Wallis Simpson's face'.

'Spare' is a wordy remonstrance by Harry against fate.

In that unlikely graveyard setting, the three have a showdown. There, Harry recalls, 'Willy in particular didn't want to hear anything. After he'd shut me down several times, he and I began sniping, saying some of the same things we'd said for months - years. It got so heated that Pa [Charles] raised his hands. Enough! He stood between us, looking up at our flushed faces: Please, boys - don't make my final years a misery.'

'All at once something shifted inside of me. I looked at Willy, really looked at him, maybe for the first time since we were boys. I took it all in: his familiar scowl, which had always been his default in dealings with me; his alarming baldness, more advanced than my own; his famous resemblance to Mummy, which was fading with time. With age. In some ways he was my mirror, in some ways he was my opposite. My beloved brother, my arch nemesis, how had that happened?'

An insider yet outside the royal family, Prince Harry felt closer to those distant from him in age - to Gan-Gan (his great-grandmother the Queen Mother) who treaAted him 'with love and humour and resApect'; to Granny (the late Queen Elizabeth II) for her 'imperturbable serenity' and for 'tapping and swaying' through the deafening Jubilee concert, wearing ear-plugs; GraAndpa (Prince Philip) for 'his many passions - carriage driving, barbecuing, shooAting, food, beer [and] the way he embraced life.'

Oscar Wilde once said that when we are young, we love...