Wallis in Warlordland
NICKY HASLAM
Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson
By Paul French
Elliott & Thompson £25
The upward re-evaluation of the woman who would eventually become the Duchess of Windsor continues apace. The scurrilous smears on her character, devised and disseminated by Stanley Baldwin’s government in a (largely successful) strategy to demonstrate she was an unsuitable wife for a future king, are proving to be unfounded, if not mendacious. This book focuses on 1924 – the scant year that Wallis, then Mrs Win Spencer, spent in Shanghai and Peking. Those were conveniently mysterious and inscrutable settings enabling Special Branch to fabricate, ten years later, the salacious China Dossier. But, as the author states, faraway London society would believe any rumour about a single woman alone in so anarchical an environment. Quite apart from debunking many of the canards that besmirched his subject, Paul French, who has lived in and frequently written about China, gives an intriguing and erudite picture of the time Wallis was there. He...
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