Hugo Vickers

Princess Alice, mother of Prince Phillip, was something of a mystery figure even within her own family. Profoundly deaf, she was born at Windsor Castle in the presence of her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, and brought up in England, Darmstadt, and Malta.

In 1903 she married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, and from then on her life was overshadowed by wars, revolutions, enforced periods of exile. Further crisis hit when, at the age of forty-five, she was removed from her family and placed in a sanatorium in Switzerland, where she was pronounced a paranoid schizophrenic. As her stay in the clinic became prolonged, there was a time where it seemed she might never walk free again.

Yet she recovered.

Illuminating and enthralling, eminent biographer Hugo Vickers's account of her life is as tumultuous and extraordinary as the times she lived through.

Hugo Vickers has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the royal family, and has had a fascination with the story of the Duchess of Windsor since he was a young man. There have been a number of books about the duchess, but this book brings a new perspective on the story by focusing on the later years of exile.