Traitor king : the scandalous exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor / Andrew Lownie.
Publication details: London : Blink Publishing, 2021.Description: 410 pages, 32 unnumbered pages of plates : portraits, photographs ; 24 cmISBN:- 9781788704830
- 9781788704816
- 9781788704878
- Windsor, Edward, Duke of, 1894-1972
- Windsor, Wallis Warfield, Duchess of, 1896-1986
- Windsor, Edward, Duke of, 1894-1972 -- Political and social views
- Nobility -- Great Britain -- Biography
- Marriages of royalty and nobility -- Great Britain -- History -- 20th century
- Kings and rulers -- Abdication
- Great Britain -- Kings and rulers -- Biography
- World War, 1939-1945
- Great Britain -- Kings and rulers -- Biography
- Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1936-1945 -- Fiction
- Great Britain -- History -- George VI, 1936-1952
- Germany -- History -- 1933-1945
- 941.084 23
Item type | Home library | Collection | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | Item reserves | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Book | Melbourne Athenaeum Library | Biography | 941.084 LOW | Available | 072206 |
"The explosive new royal biography"--Cover.
Includes bilbiography and index.
Traitor King looks at the years following the abdication of Edward VIII when the former king was kept in exile, feuding with his family over status for his wife, Wallis Simpson, and denied any real job.Drawing on extensive research into hitherto unused archives and Freedom of Information requests, it makes the case that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were not the naive dupes of the Germans but actively intrigued against Britain in both war and peace. It reveals: the story behind the German attempts to recruit the Duke as a British Petain in the summer of 1940, the efforts, by Churchill in particular, to prevent post-war publication of the captured German documents which detailed the Duke's Nazi intrigues, the reasons why the Duke, as Governor of the Bahamas, tried to shut down the investigation into the 1943 murder of his close friend Harry Oakes, the full extent of the feud with the British Royal Family, based on his betrayals going back to his dishonesty about his true financial position at the time of the Abdication, that far from a love story, Wallis felt trapped in a marriage she had never wanted with a pathetic and suffocating husband, one of the reasons she took several lovers, including the gay playboy Jimmy Donahue.