Vol. 10 No. 16 · 15 September 1988
pages 12-13 | 3450 words
The great times they could have had
Paul Foot
- Wallis: Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor by Charles Higham
Sidgwick, 419 pp, £17.95, June 1988, ISBN 0 283 99627 7
- The Secret File of the Duke of Windsor by Michael Bloch
Bantam, 326 pp, £14.95, August 1988, ISBN 0 593 01667 X
A great many books and articles have been published recently about the possibility that a former head of MI5 was the agent of a foreign power. Could there be anything more horrible, more unthinkable? Well, yes, according to Charles Higham’s extraordinary biography, there could. He suggests that not long ago the most dangerous agent of a foreign power was the King; and the second most dangerous was the King’s lover. Both were sympathetic to, and possibly active agents for, Mussolini and Hitler at a time when the British Government was about to declare war on Italy and Germany.
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Letters
Vol. 10 No. 19 · 27 October 1988
From Diana Mosley
Among many strange assertions made about the Windsors by your reviewer of Wallis: The Secret Lives of the Duchess of Windsor (LRB, 15 September) he says that my husband and I dined with them twice a week. Twice a year would be nearer the mark. We always accepted their invitations because dining with them was invariably enjoyable and sometimes interesting, but we were not asked twice a week. This could easily have been checked, because they kept a book in which visitors signed their names. I first met the Duchess nearly ten years after the end of the war, and was not her ‘confidante’. The Windsors were hospitable neighbours, no more.
Diana Mosley
Orsay, France
Vol. 10 No. 20 · 10 November 1988
From Paul Foot
In answer to Diana Mosley’s letter (LRB, 27 October), I quote from Charles Higham’s Wallis, pages 343 and 344: ‘Much of 1952 and 1953 was absorbed in work on the two houses. During this period the Duke resumed and the Duchess acquired a warm friendship … The Mosleys dined at the Mill twice a week, and the Windsors almost as frequently at the Temple de la Gloire.’ Mr Higham quotes (on page 402) as a source for this statement ‘one of the most memorable interviews of his life’ – afforded him in her home by Lady Mosley. This information was difficult to check since, most unhappily, I do not have direct access to the Duchess of Windsor’s visitors’ book.
Paul Foot
London N16
