https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jul/24/the-crown-in-crisis-by-alexander-larman-review-abdication-assassination-and-the-nazis

A new account of the difficulties of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, with contemporary resonances and speculation about an attempt to kill Edward VIII

It says something about how close the abdication of 1936 has come to slipping from living memory that Alexander Larman feels obliged to plant broad reminders early on. Remember that natty cove played by Alex Jennings and Derek Jacobi in the first three series of The Crown? That’s our leading man, the Prince of Wales, AKA Edward VIII, AKA the Duke of Windsor. Recall Andrea Riseborough being all brittle and American and fiercely-eyebrowed in W.E., that royal flop written and directed by Madonna in 2011? That’s Wallis Simpson, AKA the Duchess of Windsor. Larman doesn’t mention Edward & Mrs Simpson, the Bafta and Emmy-winning TV series of 1978, in which Edward Fox played the spoilt king to the manner born. But there again, people who watched that are old enough to remember for themselves the way that, 40 years ago, you knew not to mention the abdication in front of your grandparents for fear of being sent out of the room.

Edward & Mrs Simpson was based on Frances Donaldson’s explosive book Edward VIII: The Road to Abdication, written two years after the death of the Duke of Windsor in 1972. Donaldson’s great achievement was to show the story from the inside and in real time, by drawing on the private papers of Edward’s equerry “Fruity” Metcalfe and his wife, Baba. Donaldson was sufficiently detached from the court to be able to call out the chilly, costive atmosphere in which Edward grew up. She showed how a bleak childhood (George V remote and shouty, Queen Mary glacial and simmering) gave rise to a forlorn boy-man, who chased acceptance in all the wrong places, including fast women and fascist politics.