Andrew Lownie on his royal biographies: Mountbatten Southampton University; Edward VIII Traitor King

Mountbatten biographer says Government has spied on him during his £450,000 battle to see personal diary of royal who inspired King Charles and 'had perversion for young boys' Andrew Lownie, author of 'The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves', on how he lost £400,000 in a court case trying to get Southampton University to release the Mountbatten diaries they'd purchased. He also wrote 'Traitor King: Edward VIII' which was made in to a C4 documentary. The Mountbattens: Their Lives & Loves Andrew Lownie (2019) DICKIE MOUNTBATTEN: A major figure behind his nephew Philip's marriage to Queen Elizabeth II and instrumental in the Royal Family taking the Mountbatten name, he was Supreme Allied Commander of South East Asia during World War II and the last Viceroy of India. EDWINA MOUNTBATTEN: Once the richest woman in Britain and a playgirl who enjoyed numerous affairs, she emerged from World War II as a magnetic and talented humanitarian worker loved around the­ world. From British high society to the South of France, from the battlefields of Burma to the Viceroy's House, The Mountbattens is a rich and filmic story of a powerful partnership, revealing the truth behind a carefully curated legend. Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke & Duchess of Windsor by Andrew Lownie (2021) Traitor King, by Sunday Times bestselling author Andrew Lownie, looks at the years following the abdication of Edward VIII when the former king was kept in exile, feuding with his family over status for his wife, Wallis Simpson, and denied any real job. Drawing on extensive research into hitherto unused archives and Freedom of Information requests, it makes the case that the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were not the naïve dupes of the Germans but actively intrigued against Britain in both war and peace. It reveals: - the story behind the German attempts to recruit the Duke as a British Pétain in the summer of 1940. - the efforts, by Churchill in particular, to prevent post-war publication of the captured German documents which detailed the Duke's Nazi intrigues. - the reasons why the Duke, as Governor of the Bahamas, tried to shut down the investigation into the 1943 murder of his close friend Harry Oakes. - the full extent of the feud with the British Royal Family, based on his betrayals going back to his dishonesty about his true financial position at the time of the abdication. - that far from a love story, Wallis felt trapped in a marriage she had never wanted with a pathetic and suffocating husband, one of the reasons she took several lovers, including the gay playboy Jimmy Donahue.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58283723-traitor-king

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