Compellingly artful .. Another spectral figure haunting the text of Spare—that of Harry’s ghostwriter, J. R. Moehringer. Harry, or his publishing house...could not have chosen better.

I expected to enjoy Spare, given that it was written with the help of the talented author J.R. Moehringer.

At its best, the prince’s memoir reads like one of those popular late-1990s novels about British singletons blundering their way out of solipsistic immaturity into self-awareness and true love.

Explosive.

As much as Spare fits snugly within its genres—royal biographies, books about father-son relationships, narratives of the war on terror—Harry’s contortions against the hold of the tabloid media give it the air of a psychological thriller unlike anything we’ve ever seen from the Windsors.

Like Harry, the book is good-natured, rancorous, humorous, self-righteous, self-deprecating, long-winded. And every so often, bewildering.

Prince Harry spills more British tea than a certain band of revolutionaries did 250 years ago.

It’s not just the unrelenting stories of familial coldness or the cruelty of inherited fame in Spare that made me think of Crawford. It’s that even 45 years after the publication of her book, her allegations of abuse at the hands of her famous mother remain what define her in popular culture.

Score-settling.

There is no doubt that Spare in full gives you a picture that individual anecdotes from this extraordinary life story do not. The dominant themes are skilfully woven like a thread through JR Moehringer’s manuscript.

A book that must rank as one of the most bizarre I’ve ever read. Yes, it is – at moments – very sad. There’s ongoing shame in it for tabloid journalism. But for a title written explicitly in the cause of securing sympathy and understanding for its so-called author, boy, does it misfire.

One of the few good decisions that Prince Harry has made in the last five turbulent years was to take George Clooney’s advice and hire a ghostwriter as skilled as the novelist JR Moehringer. Spare is gripping in its ability to channel Harry’s unresolved emotional pain, his panicky, blinkered drive, his improbably winning rapscallion voice, and his skewed, conflicted worldview. Best of all, Moehringer knows how to drill down into scattered memories and extract the critical details that make this hyper-personal chronicle an unexpected literary success.

Many boring passages about the sublime beauty of the elephants of the Okavango Delta, which I suspect most of his readers will skip.

Curiously lacking in self-awareness.

My general view of the supposedly devastating revelations contained in this book is this: the publisher paid twenty million quid for this?.

This book doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents. But it’s also richly detailed and at times beautifully written; if Harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with some style.

This ghostwritten testimony, though flawed, humanises the subject.

This book doesn’t so much lift the curtain on private royal life than rip it off and shake out its contents. But it’s also richly detailed and at times beautifully written; if Harry is going to set fire to his family, he has at least done it with some style.

This must be the strangest book ever written by a royal. Prince Harry's memoir, Spare, is part confession, part rant and part love letter. In places it feels like the longest angry drunk text ever sent.

In her essay, Mantel remarked that 'Harry doesn’t know which he is, a person or a prince'. Spare is clearly the prince’s attempt to claw back personhood, to claim his own narrative.

The book is spotted with a number of unnecessary slights, with Prince William bearing the brunt of them. But I believe that readers should look past Harry’s heated prose to the bigger, and I believe valid, claims he makes. If Harry’s claims are true, the monarchy is ripe for a reckoning.

Spare... jumps chaotically from a myriad of different stylistic registers. At one point he refers to the radio as 'the wireless;' at another the British press as 'padre' — who speaks like this? Is this vernacular supposed to add charm and approachability to the millionaire prince?.

Spare is filled with lyrical meditations on royal life. The book’s opening evokes none other than William Shakespeare.

It’s true that Harry’s familiar grievances... all get space in Spare, but there is so much more.