Royally Screwed

At a time when most royal biographers (myself, alas, included) tend to major in snark and intrigue when it comes to Britain’s most beleaguered family, it is that major-domo of probity Hugo Vickers who is on hand to restore integrity and balance to historical and social dissection of the Firm. He assures us early in this biography of Wallis Simpson—published in the United States to tie-in with the new film The Duchess and I, in which none other than Joan Collins plays the ailing Duchess of Windsor and for which, inevitably, Vickers has done duty as historical consultant—that "I had been acutely aware of Queen Elizabeth II from an early age." This might not seem an especially impressive boast—so had most people—but Vickers, who was a pupil at the royals’ neighboring school of Eton, was able to witness both the Queen and her disgraced uncle, the Duke of Windsor, up close, thanks to his access to Eton’s St. George’s Chapel.

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