What to read this week, from Harry and Meghan to Alan Bennett’s diaries

BOOK OF THE WEEK

Betrayal: Power, Deceit and the Fight for the Future of the Royal Family by Tom Bower

Tom Bower is known for his no-holds-barred approach to biography, eviscerating the reputations of public figures including King Charles, Robert Maxwell, Richard Branson and David Beckham with his eye for tawdry, unforgettable details. In his new book, Bower catalogues mortifying encounters with Harry and Meghan, such as the duchess having a classroom repainted to afford her better lighting for a reading of her children’s book. Though largely “a 400-page forced march through the Sussexes’ post-Megxit fuck-ups”, as Tina Brown writes in her review, it also contains a less-remembered lesson of the Andrew scandal in “the perils to the monarchy when peripheral royals hang out with the uber-rich and start to consider themselves, by comparison, broke”.
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WHAT TO READ NEXT

You Are the Führer’s Unrequited Love by Jean-Noël Orengo, translated by David Watson

The title of Jean-Noël Orengo’s novel, shortlisted for the Prix Goncourt in 2024 and now translated into English by David Watson, is taken from a line supposedly uttered to Albert Speer by an SS officer before the war. Speer was an architect who served as Germany’s minister of armaments and war production during the second war; he was also a trusted confidant of Hitler. Their relationship was, as Chris Power points out in his review, “a twisted romance that baffled, angered and alarmed the other members of the Nazi inner circle”. The novel and Speer’s legacy both boil down to a simple question that Speer carefully tried to evade answering: how much did he really know?
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Enough Said by Alan Bennett

In this fourth collection of his diaries, Alan Bennett is living a contented life of weekends in the Yorkshire countryside and posing cheerfully for selfies when he is recognised on the streets of Primrose Hill. He lists world events like Brexit and the pandemic alongside personal milestones: some cheerful, as church bells ring out on his 90th birthday; others less so, like the string of falls that cause him to retire his bicycle. Bennett admits at one point that “this diary, I suppose [is] a belated Twitter”, and just as on that platform, reviewer Lynn Barber wonders whether this is the real Alan Bennett or a “carefully curated public performance”.
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ENDNOTES

This week, Giles Whittell reviews Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, a new biography of Elon Musk by Quinn Slobodian & Ben Tarnoff. He recalls a meeting with the tech magnate himself, 15 years ago:

In 2011, years before Musk crossed over into the land of crazy, I interviewed him in Tesla’s original Palo Alto headquarters in something close to a state of awe. Downstairs, the Model S was undergoing final testing. It would be welcomed as the best car ever built. In the car park was a row of Roadsters including, I think, the red one Musk would later send hurtling into space. Upstairs, everything about the interview was hushed. You had to lean right in to hear what he was saying. He talked about going to Moscow in the early 90s, hoping to buy disused nuclear missiles to kick-start SpaceX, and he talked earnestly about climate change. “It seems almost like the act of a three-year-old not to act soon,” he said. If there was a Muskism then, it was: see the world, fix it. Now he’s immeasurably richer and intent on tearing bits of it apart. It’s actually quite sad.
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Illustration by Charlotte Durance