Top Highlights

• With bagpipes it’s not the tune, it’s the tone. Thousands of years old, bagpipes are built to amplify what’s already in the heart. If you’re feeling silly, bagpipes make you sillier. If you’re angry, bagpipes bring your blood to a higher boil. And if you’re in grief, even if you’re twelve years old and don’t know you’re in grief, maybe especially i...
• Being a Windsor meant working out which truths were timeless, and then banishing them from your mind. It meant absorbing the basic parameters of one’s identity, knowing by instinct who you were, which was forever a byproduct of who you weren’t.
• The one piece of literature I remember enjoying, even savoring, was a slender American novel. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.
• It also takes a kind of self-love, Nige said, and this manifests as confidence. Confidence, Lieutenant Wales. Believe in yourself—that’s everything.
• he knew a secret about truth that many people are unwilling to accept: it’s usually painful. He wanted me to believe in myself, but that belief could never be based on false promises or fake compliments. The royal road to mastery was paved with facts.