Description:
Every 10 years, Anthony Holden writes a biography of Prince Charles, and they keep getting better as Charles's life gets worse. When Charles quit talking to Holden, Diana opened up. "Why must the British pride themselves so on their emotional restraint?" she asked Holden. "Look what it's done to Charles: he's an emotional cripple. It's not his fault, it was the way he was brought up." Holden tells the whole story of what one source calls "the most unnatural ... and loathsome family since Manson's," though he mostly blames Charles's emotionally AWOL mother and harsh father, and he coolly assesses Diana's calculating, actressy side. Holden shows how they assaulted each other via journalists: Andrew Morton's Diana: Her True Story being answered the next day with a Di-bashing by Penny Junor (whose 1998 book Charles: Victim or Villain? is said to bash Di posthumously). Holden offers delightful one-stop gossip shopping for dirt on the sordid, sometimes funny royal soap opera. Did you know Camilla, Charles's true love, is descended from Charles's ancestor's tootsie, known as "La Favorita" and described as "the most perfect mistress in the history of royal infidelity"? Or that Camilla's alleged line with Charles was, "My great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather's mistress--so how about it?" Besides Diana's sorrow, consider Charles's second-most-beloved mistress, "Kanga," who withered away and died after Camilla lured Charles away for lifelong al fresco sex. Holden says a cache of Kanga's letters may spark another scandal. Perhaps we'll read them in Holden's Charles at 60. --Tim Appelo
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