Midway through Spare, Prince Harry’s autobiography, he recounts an unfortunate experience of frostbite on his genitalia during a visit to the North Pole in 2011. The autobiography relates in intimate detail how he tries to bring his nether regions, which he refers to as his “South Pole,” back to life by various home remedies, including applying Elizabeth Arden cream to it. Lotioned penis in hand, the Duke of Sussex, steadily guided by his ghostwriter, recalls that “the smell transported me through time. I felt as if my mother was right there in the room.” It would be over a decade later, and in Los Angeles, that Harry would run into the man who made his fortune writing the lyrics to Christina Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle.” John Joseph Moehringer — who goes by the Rowlingesque penname of J. R. Moehringer — would transform the princeling’s oedipally tinged memories into unintentional comic poetry: “my todger, softened by Elizabeth Arden.”

Following in the ordained order of those who are born into the royal family, Harry attended first Eton — the training ground of twenty of Britain’s fifty-seven prime ministers — and later entered the military. He remained, throughout this time, constantly aware of his role as second or “spare” to his brother William, who is in line to inherit the crown, and has always seemed eminently prepped to do so. Pushed to the margins, Harry had, according to his account, the role of rebel forced upon him.

In the world of the Windsors, Harry, like a character in a nineteenth-century picaresque novel, runs to-and-fro, skating around the former imperial centers of Great Britain — the North Pole, the South Pole, Botswana (“true garden of Eden”). His recounting of these episodes falls somewhere between an earnest child’s recollection of their gap year and the imperial fantasies of the good old days held by conservatives nostalgic for empire.