If you take a certain historical happening, it’s often easy enough to pinpoint when it happened, but the why is always going to be somewhat subjective. That’s why as new sources are found, or old sources re-examined, how we understand what happened, and why it happened, changes. It also changes through the prism of current social norms and cultural beliefs. (Despite what many of us older mumsnetters were led to believe in history classes when we learned by rote what happened, when it happened and who it happened to, and that was that lol)
I haven’t read Harry’s memoir but, say William was to write one, (his father and the brother have, so not impossible), and wrote about some of the same things - for example, the dog bowl incident. What William would recall would likely differ from Harry’s recollection but neither would be wrong - because their memories are equally valid. And that is one thing that makes history interesting to me. There is rarely (never?) one single truth of two people’s past experience. Often, recall can be quite disparate, sometimes differences in recollection are minor. Two people can observe exactly the same thing and recall it differently - police know this well. We can only get at an approximate truth. As Harry and William were the only two arguing in the kitchen there can never be a third account. (If there was a third account then likely it would be different again - more so, or less so). Both stories would be true. Harry’s is true to him. Williams would be true to him. From what I’ve been told Harry did say this book was ‘his truth’. And that is exactly right. Harry also said his memory of his child/teen years is not great, and that it’s a result of trauma of his mother’s death. He has been honest in this.
I’m not sure about newspaper accounts. In history the most truthful stuff was often found in the back pages in the advertisements. Adverts would often indicate health concerns of the time, for example, say, when an std was raging. We’d see adverts for tinctures and drafts - couched in coded language. newspapers were good secondary sources (but also always questionable) but I think what is written now in tabloids, and even in more serious papers that are leaning towards tabloid/ish reporting at times to sell papers, are more open to questioning than ever.