“Bookish he will never be”, declared Edward’s tutor during his brief and abortive Oxford career.

We know that Edward could never have written this book (or any other), and that it was ghost-written by an American reporter who tried to keep a straight face while the Windsors briefed him on the fairy-tale version of their depressing and degrading marriage, in the hopes of staving off bankruptcy.

So a fairy-tale it remains, though the public of 1951 had probably not had time to shake-off the effects of the propaganda war, still ready to believe what they were told by royalty. Also, Edward was still popular with a lot of older people, who remembered his efforts to visit the men in the trenches, and in due course to modernise the (deliberately) stuffy monarchy of King George V, while some younger ones saw his abdication as the romantic sacrifice it wasn’t. The book sold well in its time.

Today it is no more than a curio, something to blow the dust off. A mass of later revelations, especially about his conduct in Paris in 1940, have shown Edward to be a cheap and shallow man, though clearly too stupid to be guilty of the diabolical scheming he was accused of. His worst wartime sin was to accept hospitality from shady people of doubtful loyalty.

If the memoirs are not to be believed, they can still provide entertaining cameos of palace life, as well as opportunities to identify the glaring falsehoods. Not for the first or last time, we are baffled by the strange world of the royal nannies - mighty odd individuals, apparently selected in the most slapdash way, and then allowed to carry on largely unsupervised. Edward’s first nanny made a point of pinching him hard, just before presenting him to his parents, so that his screams would be taken as bad behaviour. God knows what her motives could have been for this pointless cruelty, since it could be taken to reflect badly on herself. At the General Election of 1906, Edward and his younger brother Bertie (the future King George VI) took opposite sides - Edward for the Liberals, Bertie for the Tories, perhaps symbolic. And as Prince of Wales, he made quite a successful visit to Germany in 1913, only a breath away from war.

As for the lies, these are more transparent now than they would have been then. He makes no mention of blackmailing his parents into receiving Wallis at court, from where divorcees were strictly banned, and that both of them loathed her on sight. (Instead he pretends that they first saw her at an earlier reception and were struck by her grace and charm, if you please.) His account of his father’s death just replicates the BBC announcement: “The King’s life is passing peacefully towards its close”. We now know that his dying words were “Damn you!”, and that the editor of the Times had successfully petitioned to have him ‘switched off’ a few hours early, as it would look bad for the announcement to appear in the evening papers.

Meanwhile Edward is already trying to distance himself from Hitler and the Third Reich, claiming that he had regarded the Führer as a figure of ridicule from the start. Considering that he and Wallis were happy to be the guests of Hitler and Goering in October 1937, this seems rather a silly attempt at deception. And that’s quite apart from the much more serious charge that Edward (as king in March 1936), had secretly encouraged the occupation of the Rhineland - certainly believable, but not confirmed, as it came only from the mixed-up memoirs of Albert Speer.

Less easy to falsify are the events and dialogues of the feverish last days before he abdicated and went into exile. Right to the end, the options were being pushed around the table, with Wallis pleading with him to stay in the job, and allow her to go back to America, and Prime Minister Baldwin backing her with unwelcome visits to Edward’s bachelor home, Fort Belvedere. And Edward stubbornly holding out, in eternal defiance of his loved one’s declared wishes. “Wherever you go, I will follow you.” No wonder she felt sickened.

Fort Belvedere… A charming little Gothic folly in the woods, too impractical ever to make a family home. Somehow that was Edward all over, and it is not surprising that his mind was entirely absorbed by it as the ship moved off from the quayside at Newhaven on that December midnight of the soul.