Of all the varieties of modern pollution, noise is the most insidious.
Saud bin Abd al-Aziz was the moon-faced, shortsighted, bespectacled son of the old founder of Saudi Arabia, who'd always been his father's protege but had never quite lived up to everything that his father had.
There is a convention that the principal heir should be kept away from real danger. As the 'spare' rather than the heir, Harry is expected by the royal family to take the ultimate military risks.
The Billy Carter of the British monarchy.
I lived in Saudi Arabia in the late 1970s. It was, for a Westerner, pretty idyllic. There were the religious police; there were the rules; there were the prayer times. But it was as if we were existing in two separate universes. The Westerners were just allowed to get on with their way of life.
My whole life as a grammar-school boy, getting to Cambridge University and working on the 'London Sunday Times' has been very aspirational.
It's true; I'm fascinated by elite groups.
Fear generates anger, and fear generates violence, and those were part of what built the Saudi state.
