Time & Perspective Quote by Anthony Holden

The tell is in Holden’s careful hedging: “I think,” “quite,” “probably.” A journalist who once made Charles into copy is now, years later, auditing his own earlier enthusiasm. The line reads like a quiet, almost sheepish footnote to a long-running national story: the late-70s moment when Prince Charles could still be sold as the future made flesh, before the marriage, the tabloid wars, the tampon tapes, the Diana rupture, and the slow rebranding of the monarchy into something part heritage industry, part crisis-management machine.

Holden’s intent is less to praise Charles than to date-stamp a perception. “Height of his popularity” isn’t a compliment so much as a reminder that popularity is a season, not a character trait. By anchoring his relationship to Charles in “an article and then a book,” Holden signals how mediated this knowing really is. He “got to know” Charles through the act of narration, which is also an act of manufacture. The appealing Charles is, implicitly, the Charles produced by a sympathetic profile and a culture hungry for a palatable heir.

The subtext is the journalist’s dilemma: proximity creates access, access invites softness, softness gets rewritten as naivete once the subject curdles in public memory. Holden is nudging the reader to understand that his earlier portrait was conditioned by the era’s appetite and by Charles’s then-useful aura. It’s a line about monarchy, yes, but also about media complicity: how reputations are built at peak visibility, and how writers later retrofit skepticism to match the public’s changed verdict.