New book slated for September 2010

titled BEHIND CLOSED DOORS:

The Life and Death of the Duchess of Windsor

by Society Member and noted historian Hugo Vickers

Hugo Vickers above © Elizabeth Vickers

Press release dated 5/6/2009 from Hutchinson:

Paul Sidey, editorial director of Hutchinson (a division of Random House Group company), has acquired from Gillon Aitken at Aitken and Alexander a dramatic new book about Edward and Mrs Simpson, a subject which has preoccupied the author for nearly forty years. Hugo Vickers is a living encyclopaedia on royal matters, and has been granted access to important unpublished papers that have never been made available before.

Inevitably, this is a sad story, especially of the Duchess's final years – old, sick and manipulated by her unscrupulous lawyer, Maitre Blum. There was also much internal feuding among the royals while the couple were in exile.  Lord Mountbatten, in particular, does not emerge with any medals for good behaviour.

It is clear that Wallis Simpson did not lure the King from the throne, and that it was Edward who rewrote history, convincing himself that there was an establishment plot against him.

Now Hugo Vickers sets the record straight.

For publication in hardback by Hutchinson in September 2010 and in Arrow paperback the following year.

Paul Sidey says, 'Hugo is planning a kind of QUEST FOR CORVO detective story, so this new study of the doomed lovers will be both personal and revelatory.'

Hugo Vickers says, 'Like so many people I find the story of the Windsors perennially fascinating. No man ever gave up so much for one woman. I lived through the later saga since that summer day in May 1972 when I first walked up the drive of the Windsors' house in Paris. The story of what happened to the Duchess in her last years has long needed to be told, and at last I can.'

Hutchinson is an imprint of Cornerstone Publishing, a Random House Group company.  The Random House Group is an independently managed subsidiary of Random House Inc in the US, the trade book publishing division of Bertelsmann AG, one of the world's largest and most diversified integrated media companies.