Was it the greatest love story of the twentieth century or a bloodless coup?

She was the first person to be named Woman of the Year by Time magazine, and yet Wallis Simpson remains one of the most reviled women in history. The ‘social climbing’ divorcée is remembered as a snob and voluptuary who came close to destroying the British monarchy.

But could she have been the pawn of Allied statesmen determined to remove a Nazi sympathiser from the throne?

This memoir, found in her former Paris home, is said to have been written by Wallis herself. And although the Duchess is a highly unreliable narrator, Kate Auspitz, an American historian, is a meticulous scholar, supplying pages of endnotes that ground the story firmly in published recollections of the major figures of the time.