[imagesource: Wikimedia Commons]

Prince Harry’s memoir has been dominating the news cycle thanks to a little tidbit about Prince William hitting him to the ground during an argument once.

That, along with all the other no-holds-barred revelations and stories involving the Duke of Sussex, has made the book, Spare, a sensation, as you can imagine.

See the media frenzy, the likes of the Daily Mails’ rabid royal writers‘ mouths afroth, tongues sharpened and at the ready.

Apparently, the Spanish version of the much-anticipated memoir went on sale a little earlier than it should have, and the translations have been making the rounds, Vogue reports.

We’re doing our due diligence and rounding up Spare’s most headline-making claims, from Harry’s early experimentation with drugs to his strained relationship with his father and brother.

First up, Harry’s brawl with his brother. Over to Reuters:

Harry says his brother William, now heir to the British throne, knocked him to the floor during a 2019 argument at his London home over Harry’s American wife Meghan. William called Meghan “difficult”, “rude” and “abrasive”, Harry writes.

He says William grabbed him by the collar and knocked him to the floor, where Harry says he landed on a dog’s bowl, cracking it. He says he refused William’s challenge to hit back and that his brother later apologised over the incident.

Harry has been rather honest about his experimentation with drugs, including a tell-all about the time he tried cocaine for the first time at aged 17.

It was at a friend’s country house where he’d “been offered a line and I’d done a few more since”. Although, he reckons the media wrongly categorised him as a drug addict as he says he didn’t actually enjoy it all that much:

“It wasn’t much fun and it did not make me feel especially happy as it seemed to do to everyone else, but it did make me feel different, and that was my main objective. I was a 17-year-old boy ready to try anything that altered the pre-established order,” he writes.

He likewise opens up about smoking marijuana both at Eton and on the grounds of Kensington Palace:

“After dinner, I’d smoke a joint, making sure that the smoke didn’t reach the garden of my neighbour, the Duke of Kent,” he says of his life in 2015, a period during which he had given up partying. “Then I’d go to bed early.”

Harper’s Bazaar reveals how Harry lost his virginity to an “older lady” in public, nogal:

Harry says he lost his virginity to an “older lady” who “loved horses very much.” The moment, he says, was “a humiliating episode” that took place “in a field.”

“I mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and held me back … one of my mistakes was letting it happen in a field, just behind a busy pub,” an excerpt obtained by Sky News reads. “No doubt someone had seen us.”

Another gasp-worthy story is how Kate and William apparently made Harry wear a Nazi costume to a party once:

After owning his decision to wear a Nazi uniform to a Halloween party in 2005 during Harry & Meghan (“probably one of the biggest mistakes of my life”), Harry writes in Spare that the Prince and Princess of Wales allegedly encouraged him to wear it. “I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought,” he writes. “They both howled. Worse than Willy’s leotard outfit. Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point.”

It gets more interesting.

As a veteran who did two tours of duty in Afghanistan during his 10 years in the army, Harry revealed that he had killed exactly 25 Taliban fighters on the ground:

“It’s not a number that fills me with satisfaction, but nor does it embarrass me,” he writes, noting that he chose to see Taliban fighters as “chess pieces removed from the board” because “you can’t kill people if you see them as people”.

You tell yourself what you can to sleep at night, Harry.

There’s also a story about when Harry went on a trip to the Arctic and came back with a frostbitten “todger” (British for penis, if you didn’t know). Jimmy Kimmel has the jokes on that at the 8:11 mark:

Other than all that, Spare includes revelations about how Harry and William had asked their father not to marry Camilla Parker-Bowles, how King Charles often joked that “who knows if I’m even your real father?”, along with other “bits of tid” that outline how the tension between the British royal family and Harry just got worse and worse.

Ja, no, spokespeople for Charles and William have not made a single comment – yet?

The Daily Mail has certainly commented and criticised, though, as was to be expected.

[sources:reuters&vogue&harpersbazaar]