Traitor King

Critics Review

• Lownie expertly captures the extravagance (they never travelled with fewer than 73 pieces of luggage), the sense of entitlement, the snobbery, the vanity, the selfpity, the bone-idle laziness, the fundamental uselessness of their lives as outcasts. ‘I never saw a man so bored,’ said one acquaintance. Should this be required reading in a certain household in Montecito, California?

  Daily Mail History Books of the Year

• Meticulously researched

  Spectator

• Briskly written and compulsively readable…Does Andrew Lownie persuade me that it is worth telling the story again, and that he has made out the case for his unforgiving title? The answer is an unambiguous yes.

  TLS

• Entertaining… convincing… timely. Urgent reading for royals

  Evening Standard

• Darkly compelling…hundreds of eye-popping details…Gripping though it is, this is an unrelentingly damning portrait of the Windsors

  Daily Mail

• Compelling… a devastating portrait of the duke and duchess… a timely point of comparison when set against the ongoing trials and tribulations of the House of Windsor

  The Tablet

• Lownie reveals Edward not as a dupe of the Nazis, but an active and culpable collaborator…The list of individuals interviewed and archives consulted is formidable. The more impressive then, that this is a wonderfully readable and succinct story

  BBC History Magazine

• Thoroughly researched and compelling narrative of one of the most controversial periods in royal history.

  Andrew Morton

• Andrew Lownie has a remarkable ability to fashion a compelling narrative from raw archive text and personal reminiscence. His Traitor King (Blink, £25), about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and their questionable cohorts, is every bit as absorbing as his earlier history of the Mountbattens.

  Andrew Lycett, Spectator Books of the Year

• ‘definitively answering some of the enduring mysteries …Lownie fearlessly yet fairly provides the answers. Lownie appears to have red every book ever written about the Windsors and drilled deep into unpublished archives as well…Lownie has dug into the couple’s complex love lives just as deeply…The full ghastly truth about them has remained obscure until now, partly thanks to a judicious cover-up by the British Establishment…’

  History Today

• Meticulously researched and with so much new material on one of the most controversial Royals of the 20th century. Lownie reveals shocking new aspects to the life of Edward, Duke of Windsor, and firmly placed the Duke as a traitor to his country.

  Aspects of History

• this “explosive new royal biography” (front-cover blurb) by the highly regarded author of books about Guy Burgess and the Mountbattens,.. a biographer as serious and scholarly as Andrew Lownie …Lownie gives heft to George Orwell’s famous observation that the England of that time was a family, but one “with the wrong members in control”

  Times Book of the Week

• “Andrew Lownie’s compelling volume… an unflattering portrait of this entitled couple.”

  Daily Mail Books of the Year 2021

• Through meticulous research Lownie makes a convincing argument for the duke’s treachery…Edward is revealed for what he was: a traitor to the British people and an ally to Hitler….Academic in its tone and shocking in its contents Lownie goes where no royal biography has gone before. It sheds new light on British history and during the Second World War and would make for a stellar tv series.

  The Lady

• Compelling and conclusive.

  Clive Irving, bestselling author of The Last Queen

• Andrew Lownie does not pull his punches. His well researched biography of the former Edward V111, before and after his abdication, will shock even the most loyal royalist.

  Sir Christopher Ondaatje, author of The Last Colonial

• An absorbing and easily digestible book

  Telegraph

• This readable, damning synthesis confirms that Edward’s abdication was the free world’s good fortune.

  Wall St Journal

• Compelling and conclusive. Wallis Simpson performed a great service to the Windsors by removing Edward VIII from the throne. As Andrew Lownie definitively proves, he was totally unfit to be king and his willingness to be Hitler’s satrap would have finished the monarchy.

  Clive Irving, bestselling author of The Last Queen

• Lownie has uncovered an array of new sources regarding the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, and he exhibits a sovereign command of the existing biographies. Tackling the most sensitive subjects-the Duke and Duchess’ sexuality, their pro-Nazi views, their problematic behavior during the war, and the complicated nature of their relationship-Lownie has painted the most convincing portrait of the couple to date. The results are fascinating.

  Jonathan Petropoulos, author of Royals and the Reich: The Princes von Hessen in Nazi Germany

• “Lownie gathers convincing evidence of Edward’s collaboration with Germany and amasses a wealth of new material, including intimate details about the Duchess’s affair with American socialite James Donahue. Royal watchers will be riveted.”

  Publishers Weekly

• Lownie’s well-researched and comprehensive book proves there’s more to learn about the couple. Readers will find not salacious gossip but careful analysis and an accurate portrait of an unpleasant, grasping, manipulative couple trying to find purpose in their lives. Edward later publicly renounced the worst Nazi offenses, but his friendships, comments, and antisemitism reveal another truth. Crisp prose, meticulous research, and careful objectivity make Lownie’s biography accessible to all readers.

  Library Journal

• ‘Does anyone want to read yet another book about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor? Perhaps not, but if you tackle this most recent one, there will be no need to read any more on the subject. Among the dozens of biographies, memoirs, diaries, novels, documentaries, interviews, musicals, dramas, and films that have emerged over the last eighty years, none-until Andrew Lownie’s book Traitor King-has fully uncovered the devastating truth of what the two were really up to in their collaboration with Hitler and the Nazi Party’

  Criterion

• ‘…admirably detached and well supported by evidence….an agreeably unsentimental approach to the narrative.’

  Jonathan Keates