The Albany Gazette - Key points from Prince Harry's memoir

- Altercation -

Harry claims his older brother Prince William attacked him during an argument about his wife Meghan.

"He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor.

"I landed on the dog's bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out."

- 'Arch-nemesis' -

Harry refers to William as "my beloved brother, my arch-nemesis".

He writes that he was desperate for William's company after their mother Diana died but that his brother disowned him when Harry started at the same senior school, Eton College.

Harry also recounts a childhood fight in the back of a car driven by their father, the future King Charles III. He orders William to get out and ride in a separate car driven by bodyguards.

"Behind us, I could just make out the future King of England, plotting his revenge," the memoir states.

- 'Misery' -

Charles pleaded with his sons to stop fighting at a meeting after the funeral of his own father, Prince Philip, in April 2021.

"Please, boys -- don't make my final years a misery," he told them, according to the memoir, after Harry sought to explain his reasons for quitting Britain and royal duties.

Harry also recounts Charles's own childhood misery at the hands of vicious bullies at his Scottish boarding school. "I remember him murmuring ominously: I nearly didn't survive."

- 'Unfunny joke' -

Harry reveals that Charles used to joke about whether he was really his father.

"Who knows if I'm really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I'm even your real father?" Harry quotes his father as saying.

"He'd laugh and laugh, though it was a remarkably unfunny joke, given the rumour circulating just then that my actual father was one of Mummy's former lovers: Major James Hewitt."

Harry also reveals that Charles wanted to name him Albert, after Queen Victoria's husband, but that Diana vetoed it in preference to Henry.

- Sainted mother -

The book's most emotive passages touch on Diana's death, and Harry's long refusal to believe she had actually gone. He sees her everywhere, in his mind's eye and in dreams.

"Maybe she was omnipresent for the very same reason that she was indescribable -– because she was light, pure and radiant light, and how can you really describe light?

"Even Einstein struggled with that one."

- 'Heir and spare' -

Harry writes in the book about his father's delight when Diana gave birth to a so-called "spare" in 1984.

Charles supposedly told his wife that Harry's arrival meant she had now given him both an heir and a spare -- and that his work was done.

"Pa and William could never be on the same flight together, because there must be no chance of the first and second in line to the throne being wiped out," the book says.

"But no one gave a damn whom I travelled with; the Spare could always be spared."

- Camilla -

Harry states that he and William "begged" their father not to marry Queen Consort Camilla, with whom Charles was having an affair while married to their mother.

He recounts that the brothers said they would not stand in the way of Charles' relationship with her, but asked that they did not marry.

"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.

"In a funny way I even wanted Camilla to be happy. Maybe she'd be less dangerous if she was happy?"

- Charles's headstands -

"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 a door or hanging from a bar like a skilled acrobat."

- Drugs -

Harry acknowledges using cannabis regularly, and cocaine on several occasions when he was a teenager, saying he was "willing to try almost anything that would alter the pre-established order".

But he adds of the cocaine: "It wasn't very fun, and it didn't make me feel especially happy as seems to happen to others, but it did make me feel different, and that was my main objective.

"To feel. To be different."

- Virginity -

Harry recounts losing his virginity in a field behind a busy pub, to an "older lady" who "loved horses very much".

But he says it was a "humiliating episode" and rued it happening in the open, where they might have been seen.

- 'Your mother is with you' -

Harry recounts seeking help since moving to California from a woman who "claimed to have 'powers'" and an ability to relay messages from the dead.

The Duke of Sussex acknowledges "the high-percentage chance of humbuggery", but writes that he felt "an energy around her" as soon as they met.

"Your mother is with you... right now," he says the woman told him. Harry says his neck grew warm and his eyes watered.

"Your mother says: You're living the life she couldn't. You're living the life she wanted for you," she said.

- Future retribution? -

Harry visits the Scottish royal retreat at Balmoral, "nearly on top of the site of another castle dating to the fourteenth century, within a few generations of another Prince Harry".

That Harry "got himself exiled, then came back and annihilated everything and everyone in sight".

"My distant kin. My kindred spirit, some would claim."

(L.Kaufmann--BBZ)