Prince Charles
Michael Joseph 624pp £25 The Week Bookshop £20
Prince Charles is a man “perennially in search of the simple life”, said Lynn Barber in The Sunday Times. At various points, he has “looked for it in the Kalahari Desert, a croft in the Outer Hebrides” and “the monasteries of Mount Athos”. Yet in his day-to-day life, he has seldom stinted on luxury. When staying with other people, he often brings his own food and drink with him. “My people take such good care of me,” he told a fellow guest at Windsor Castle. “They always bring my salt.” On the “one occasion” he had to fly club rather than first class, he remarked: “It puzzled me as to why the seat seemed so uncomfortable.” Sally Bedell Smith, a Vanity Fair journalist, is a sympathetic biographer, and makes a “conscientious stab” at portraying him favourably. She is good on his charity work and “American friendships” (he once had tea with Donald Trump). But still, “the message seems to be Long Live the Queen”.
Despite Bedell Smith being an avid royalist, she is unable to conceal her “fundamental dislike of her subject”, said Zoë Heller in The New Yorker. “The man we encounter here is a ninny, a whinger, a tantrum-throwing dilettante” and a “preening snob” who has been “hopelessly misled about the extent of his own talents”. A “sickly” and “timorous” child, Charles was a “source of puzzlement and some disappointment to his parents”, particularly Prince Philip, who thought him “weedy, effete and spoiled”. At Gordonstoun, his “famously spartan” Scottish public school, the “jug-eared, non-sportif future king” was a “prime target for bullying”. In his 20s, Charles briefly gained notoriety as a “dashing playboy” – though he felt the image “did a disservice to his thoughtfulness and spirituality”. In Bedell Smith’s account, the “sweet boy” who discovered (thanks to the Queen Mother) an “early love of Mozart” becomes the lonely schoolboy, and then the unhappy adult trapped in the “hell” of his marriage to Diana Spencer, said Ysenda Maxtone Graham in The Times. To read this minutely detailed “brick of a biography” is to feel, by turns, “immense pity and sympathy” for its subject, and “exasperation at his hypocrisies”. “Charles’s longing to make the world a prettier, more human and more sustainable place comes across strongly on every page.” Yet his efforts have often gone unrecognised, and he remains largely unloved by his future subjects. As Bedell Smith notes, Charles has “spent a lifetime waiting for the ultimate role… while being constantly misunderstood”.