Edward VIII’s infatuation with Wallis Simpson was so overwhelming that it seemed to demand an extraordinary explanation. Some insiders concluded that he had gone mad, among them his private secretary, who said that he should be locked up. Others thought that the king had been bewitched – that this twice-married American sorceress had stolen his soul. The most lurid rumours were supposedly substantiated by the so-called ‘China Dossier’, said to have been commissioned by either Queen Mary or Stanley Baldwin. It apparently maintained that Mrs Simpson held the sovereign in thrall by means of oriental sexual techniques, notably the ‘Shanghai grip’, which ‘makes a matchstick feel like a cigar’. Allegedly, she had acquired these skills during a stay in the Far East, where, a society lady assured Chips Channon, she had been ‘practically a tart’.

Channon denounced this as ‘nonsense’, but it is true that Wallis did spend 1924–5 in China in equivocal circumstances. She went in a vain attempt to save her failing first marriage. But her husband, a naval officer called Winfield Spencer who had been posted to the country, remained a drunken bully. Moreover, he took her to Hong Kong ‘sing-song houses’, where he made an ostentatious fuss of the girls. Wallis soon left him. Despite her slender means and the fact that warlords had reduced China to turmoil, she travelled first to Shanghai and then to Peking. Here she stayed with her rich friends Herman and Katherine Rogers. Svelte and alluring, though more androgynous than voluptuous, Wallis attracted men in droves and may well have had amorous relationships with members of the louche Western community. 

Basking in China’s delights and entranced by its exotic ambience, she described her time there as her ‘Lotus Year’. This is the subject of Paul French’s book, which promises more than it delivers. The blurb declares that ‘little was really known about how she spent that mysterious period in