PRINCE CHARLES

The passions and paradoxes of an improbable life Sally Bedell Smith Penguin/Michael Joseph

Being in the shadow of the throne, particularly a shadow of such magnitude, has shaped the personality and life of king-inwaiting HRH Prince Charles. For all its pomp and privilege, it seems in many ways an unenviable life. And yet, Prince Charles has carved out a place and a purpose for himself and, through his entrepreneurial pursuits, especially The Prince’s Trust, has improved the lives of hundreds of thousands of young people in Britain. Eminent biographer Sally Bedell Smith takes us from Charles’s lonely childhood and difficult schooling years, through his personal relationships and intellectual and business pursuits to the place, after a half century ‘in waiting’, he occupies today. Laying bare the contradictions of a man who is more complicated than we knew, it is both a sympathetic and an unvarnished account.