What possessed the Duke of Windsor to visit Nazi Germany in 1937?

Bombs start exploding at the beginning of this book. Buckingham Palace was targeted by the Nazis early on in the war in an act of extraordinary audacity – and one that backfired. George VI noted in his diary: ‘We all wondered why we weren’t dead.’ Little did he realise that Hitler had gifted him his first wartime ace. But while George grew into the role of stoic monarch, his older brother never worked out how shake off the trammels of his birth.

The Windsors at War is a follow-up to Alexander Larman’s The Crown in Crisis, which explored the abdication of 1936. Edward VIII did not escape lightly in that book, and this sequel’s introduction reminds readers of the author’s earlier crushing conclusion: that the failed king was a ‘wretched, quixotic ruler, an obsessed and demanding lover, and, bar the odd instance of compassion and decency, a selfish and thoughtless man’.