This riotous and engaging biography has it all: two brothers at each other’s throats, two wives who loathe each other, and the duke’s ill-advised visit to Germany
has revolutionised the way we view the royal family, triangulating as it does between three competing sources: the truth, fiction and rumour. When we mourned the Queen last year, many of us, I think, will have intermixed memories of her from real life with the far more intimate and revealing portraits we got from.
All of this, of course, presents a challenge for the royal biographer. We come to this family and their story with expectations of drama and revelation, entertainment and scandal. And yet it is a family that seeks – with a few notable exceptions – to maintain an air of haughty secretiveness, revealing as little as possible of its inner workings.
The duke and Göring play with a toy aeroplane that dropped wooden bombs onto a convoy of trains belowbiographer. He recognises the frisson that we all require from our encounters with royalty now, delivering them with knowing winks and fruity nods., continuing the story of the absurd and rakish Edward VIII now he is merely Edward, Duke of Windsor, “former king and continued irritant”.
There is more to this book than mere titillation. What Larman does so brilliantly is to give us two brothers who could not be less alike, two wives who clearly loathe one another, visions of two very different, but very loving marriages. He draws on a host of previously unpublished material, much of which concerns Edward and Wallis’s Nazi sympathies.
Edward VIII and Mrs Wallis Simpson on a sightseeing tour of Trogir, Yugoslavia, in 1936, before his abdication.Much more interesting than this is the strange and febrile dynamic of the relationship between the two brothers: the money-hungry, vain and infantile Edward and the king, whom Chips Channon called “the dullest, most boring but well-meaning little man on Earth”.
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