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Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles Times
Entertainment
Mary McNamara

Mary McNamara: It's a blast watching Harry and Meghan beat the press at its own game

Revenge is a dish best served cold, over many courses and paid for by someone else.

I come to you having actually read Harry Windsor's much-anticipated and intentionally controversial memoir, "Spare." Not the lists of "Top Five Bombshells" or "Key Takeaways" but the book itself, from start to finish. It is a quick read, more sad than sensational, ringing with exactly the sort of loneliness, frustration and rebellion one would expect from a still-young, motherless prince whose royal bubble of a life has been narrated through the emotional whipsaw of tabloid headlines. An earnest, almost childlike attempt to explain what that life felt like to the boy and man inside the bubble.

More important, it is the capstone of a personal disclosure campaign that puts Lena Dunham to shame. That the royal family is a chilly, oppressive and internally competitive institution that will eat its young to survive can come as no surprise to anyone with knowledge of Princess Diana's life and death or Peter Morgan's highly regarded royal multiverse of "The Queen" and "The Crown."

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