But what was fascinating about him was he wasn’t just a ruler and a builder – he was also a playwright. Thinking back to your first travelogue, In Xanadu, published in 1986 – what would you tell the young William in that book now? All I’d tell young William is to realise how incredibly lucky he is and how fragile all these cultures and civilisations were. If I ever want to show off to a nephew, I tell them about how I was shot at in the West Bank, Kashmir and Kandahar. So I’d go for the full baroque Requiem – but I suspect it’ll just be a single piper in the Highlands.