A new account of the months Simpson spent in China debunks the well-worn gossip about sexual adventures and opium addiction and even invites admiration for a ‘buccaneering’ woman

The seemingly never-ending obsession with Wallis Simpson on the part of writers, publishers and (presumably) readers is at this point beginning to seem quite crazed. What more can there be left to say? But always, another book; and always, the Daily Mail will make the most of the scraps it dishes up. Paul French’s Her Lotus Year claims to tell “for the first time” the full story of the months the future Duchess of Windsor spent in China in the mid-1920s. Not only does it arrive highly praised by other Simpson biographers (it’s as if they all belong to a syndicate or something), but the Mail has already run a helpfully piquant piece featuring the sexual techniques Simpson supposedly learned while she was up to nothing-very-much in Hong Kong, Shanghai and what was then Peking.

Only there’s a problem here. French’s book, like others before it, wholly debunks the existence of the so-called “China Dossier”, a document reputedly used by the British establishment to besmirch Simpson’s name at the time of the abdication. The rumours that then swirled round Edward VIII’s American divorcee – that she frequented brothels, was addicted to opium and modelled for pornographic photographs – have, he says, no basis in reality. If she did indeed know how to perform the infamous Singapore grip – pelvic floor exercises avant la lettre – it was a secret kept between Simpson and her lovers (of which she did, at least, have several). Such stories were then, as now, only gossip: “Venom, venom, VENOM,” as Simpson put it.