Time & Perspective Quote by Jonathan Dimbleby

There is a quiet audacity in the phrase "the moment seemed right": it frames biography not as a neutral record, but as an intervention timed to history. Dimbleby isn’t pretending the subject simply accumulated facts until a book fell out. He’s signaling a calculation about appetite, access, and institutional mood. Royal lives become publishable when the public is ready to metabolize them and when the palace can no longer fully control the narrative.

"Full and, if possible, authoritative" is the tell. "Full" flatters the reader with the promise of completeness, the fantasy that a complicated public figure can be made legible in one sweep. "If possible" is a lawyerly hedge that acknowledges the paradox of writing about monarchy: you can get proximity, even interviews, without ever getting the whole truth. Authority here is less about omniscience than about a claim to legitimacy in a crowded ecosystem of gossip, hagiography, and tabloid hostility. Dimbleby positions himself as the grown-up in the room.

The clincher is "life and character". That pairing elevates the project from chronology to moral portraiture, smuggling in evaluation under the banner of description. Character is where biography becomes verdict: it’s an invitation to reframe the Prince of Wales not as a symbol to be managed, but as a person whose choices, flaws, and temperament matter.

Contextually, this is the biography’s opening move as a power play: to establish timing, scope, and jurisdiction before the palace, the press, or the reader can argue about what counts as the "real" prince.