Can YOU Recommend the Most Salacious Wallis Simpson-Duke of Windsor Biography?

Whatever you do, avoid Madonna’s glossed over take on their “love story”. W.E. Conveniently omits their racism and nazi lovin way

[quote]I'm not into 'the royal family'

Sure, Jan

I never went out if my way to learn anything more about them. Except once: a Vanity Fair style piece about their later days in Paris, where they would start the day reading the shipping news with an eye to rich Americans who might be arriving in Paris. They would have a secretary call and, as if mistaking them for someone they knew, arrange a lunch at The Ritz or some posh hotel, show up, be alternately sullen or cheery as the bill approached, and always manage to make their American guests their American hosts at the the last minute, often getting a check as well for the equivalent of USD 500 or so for some inconvenience of having left a wallet at home, just until it could be paid back...

Shameless grifters could take lessons from this lot.

I read a couple of unsympathetic books about them yeas ago. I will try to find out the titles. They were real pigs.

The one at the link was really good. I read it years ago, and another one, to read after, is "Dancing with the Devil: The Windsors and Jimmy Donohue," I think the author was Christopher Wilson. Then there's a book about the Windsors and the Nazis, I think it's called "17 Carnations." that is much more recent. So those should keep you busy. Don't bother with Hugo Vickers. He's too sympathetic and the published letters are cap. Who needs them.

Try Deborah Cadbury’s “Princes at War“, which tells the story of George VI and his brothers, the Dukes of Windsor, Kent and Gloucester in and around the Second World War. Suffice it to say that three of these men were deeply committed to the fight against the Nazis, and one couldn’t even spend the war sunning himself in the Bahamas without becoming embroiled in scandal. He was lucky not to end up charged with treason (for his closeness to Nazis and their agents even after Dunkirk) or desertion (for showing a marked reluctance to return to Britain from Spain after he fled there instead of heading to Bordeaux to get a ship back to the UK).

Windsor, who had been so charming in his youth, had an incredibly selfish streak and was completely incapable of considering the feelings of anyone except for him and his wife. After the German invasion of France, he left his own Private Secretary stranded in Paris, and didn’t even tell him that he was leaving. Even Churchill, who supported him throughout the abdication crisis came to see him as a traitor or a liability. He basiscally had to ask the Windsors several times to head back to Britain, and was ignored for weeks, until he finally grew so suspicious of their motives that he threatened Windsor with a court martial if he didn’t obey the orders of His Majesty’s government and embark on a ship to take him and his wife to the Bahamas, where they could not cause as much trouble.

"Windsor, who had been so charming in his youth, had an incredibly selfish streak and was completely incapable of considering the feelings of anyone except for him and his wife."

"What's bred in the bone will out of the flesh." Intentional misquote, but spot on.