Somewhere in Montecito on Sunday, a balding Englishman will celebrate his birthday over a bold Tignanello, clinking glasses with his glamorous Californian wife. Like Footloose, Agadoo and the original Apple Mac, Prince Harry is turning 40 — leaving behind a …
Meghan and Harry are making us stupid
Ever since the cancellation of the Sussexes’ Spotify deal, it’s been unclear what they’d pivot to next. A Kardashians-style reality show? A wellness empire, à la Gwyneth Paltrow? A high-profile divorce with all the sordid trimmings (and, for Harry, perhaps …
How I knew my phone was hacked
Prince Harry isn’t the only one who has been having trouble with his phone. About 40 years ago, I began to hear strange clicking sounds when I picked up the receiver; being of a rational cast of mind, I put …
Prince Harry is haunted by his ghostwriter
“The birth of the reader must be at the expense of the death of the author.” So announced the French literary critic Roland Barthes in 1967, indicating what he assumed was the total irrelevance of authorial identity to the appreciation …
What is King Charles hiding?
My first political memory was an epochal one: the fall of the Berlin Wall. The grainy footage of East and West Berliners in stone-washed denim, hammering at the graffitied concrete that had so long separated them, and pouring through breaches …
Paris Hilton teaches Prince Harry a lesson
If you’re a female celebrity memoirist — and especially if you happen to be white, hot, blonde, and possessed of a net worth in the tens of millions — you are expected to make a privilege disclaimer: to marinate in …
Harry and Meghan’s Montecito prison
Jeremy Clarkson’s savage polemic against Meghan Markle, with its sick fantasy of splattering her naked body with mud, may be of interest to, of all people, philosophers. Philosophers of language talk about “performatives”, meaning bits of language which get something …
My Prince Harry moment
I became a priest on a hot summer’s day at Lichfield Cathedral. I was as prepared as I thought I could be for the vows I was about to take. What I wasn’t prepared for, though, was the whole paraphernalia …
Why Harry couldn’t be a hero
Prince Harry has finally taken up the role he was always destined to fill. If Diana was, as Tony Blair dubbed her, the Princess of Hearts, Harry is her true heir: the Prince of Lolcows.
A “lolcow”, for those who …
Prince Harry’s Faustian bargain
One of the characteristics of fame is that it is essentially Faustian in nature; to become a celebrity, one must sell one’s soul to the devil. It’s a highly questionable idea — why should there be such a price for …
Prince Harry’s unbrotherly resentment
It is all in Genesis IV.
“Now Abel kept flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering …
Prince Harry’s unbrotherly resentment
It is all in Genesis IV.
“Now Abel kept flocks and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering …
Harry and Meghan’s moral exile
Harry and Meghan divide opinion very much along the lines of whether one believes we have obligations beyond our control. I still remember a Christmas family row, me a stroppy teenager, that concluded with me insisting: “I didn’t ask to …
Why Prince Harry went to war
Every few generations, the Windsors produce unhappy princes: men who can neither leave nor stay. Prince Albert, the older brother of George V, was one, but he politely died of pneumonia before he could take the throne. Edward VIII was …
Our Queen’s sacrifice
It seems that it should be a near spiritual ritual of Britishness to live through the end of the reign of one sovereign and the beginning of another. The emotions around the death of a monarch are, for those who …