When I was younger, says Ronald Reagan’s daughter Patti Davis in The New York Times, I wrote an autobiography that “flung open the gates of our troubled family life”. My justification was very similar to Prince Harry’s: I wanted “to set the record straight”, and naively believed expressing “my own feelings and my own truth” might help my family understand me better. It didn’t, of course – and not just because my parents resented being “embarrassed and exposed in public”. It’s because, as I’ve realised since, the truth is “way more complicated than it seems when we’re young”. Presenting our recollections as the one true narrative betrays the other people who “inhabit our story”, who all have their own truths as well.

“As a general rule,” says Simon Tisdall in The Observer, “the more medals a dictator wears, the more absurd and dangerous they are.” It’s certainly true of Myanmar’s “junta boss”, General Min Aung Hlaing, strutting about in a uniform “adorned with meaningless decorations and gaudy gold braid”. Since his military coup in 2021, 2,600 Burmese people have been murdered and 17,000 detained. Children are imprisoned, tortured and sexually abused. The general recently “celebrated” Myanmar’s 75th independence anniversary – days after slapping another prison term on Aung San Suu Kyi, the democratically elected leader he deposed – thanking countries who have refused to follow the EU, US and UK in imposing sanctions. “He might have mentioned Russia, too, his main arms supplier.”