Jane Ridley
Where’s Wallis?
Behind Closed Doors: The Tragic, Untold Story of the Duchess of Windsor
By Hugo Vickers
Hutchinson 462pp £25 order from our bookshop
The English love to hate Wallis Simpson. She is vilified as the gold-digging sex goddess who stole our film-star king, Edward VIII. Hugo Vickers has spent a lifetime following Wallis. At the age of twelve, when most children his age were in thrall to the Beatles, Hugo was a fan of the Duchess of Windsor. His researches have convinced him that Wallis has been unfairly treated, and that she was not a villain but a victim. This was true throughout her life, but never more so than at the end.
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'Typical of Dickens to leave us with an unsolvable game of Cluedo. Was it John Jasper with the necktie in the cathedral, Stony Durdles with the fibula in the graveyard or Mrs Crisparkle with the arsenic in the close?'
Frances Wilson does some sleuthing.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/murder-he-wrote-2
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They 'disliked Georgian architecture because it was identified with the enclosure movement ... their preferred style was Elizabethan: half-timbered and gabled'.
Jane Ridley on the houses Edwardian Liberals built.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/liberal-habitats