The big thing I got out of the Brown book was the hysteria surrounding the King Edward/Wallis Simpson story. The public couldn't get enough of it, and it amounted to nothing more than a real-time soap opera. It proves the current fixation on the Tiger Woods story is nothing new.
I'm not exactly sure I'd rate the story of King Edward in the same breath as the Tiger Woods story. A bachelor king provoking a constitutional and monarchical crisis over "the woman I love," even if she was a multiple divorcee in that time and place, isn't exactly the same thing---possibly more grave---than a golf champion with a birdie on every course and a wife back in the clubhouse, so to say. Say what you will about Edward VIII but at least he had the taste (if we can call it that) to do his womanising while he was still a bachelor. (On the other hand, Edward had a rather discomfiting taste for married women in the randy years before he met Wallis; indeed, his own father prayed he'd never marry or have children, the better to make sure the throne skipped Edward in favour of either his son Albert or his granddaughter . . . )
Plus Edward wasn't exactly facing that much world condemnation over it---there were many enough who thought it was one of the most romantic stories of the time, an honest-to-God king willing to throw it all away (most of it, anyway) for love, never mind that it made a rather reluctant king out of his brother George VI, and only later did the activities of the since-Duke and Dutchess of Windsor make them not romantic but controversial and even distasteful figures.
Yes, agreed. Somewhat more serious than Tiger’s woods.
However, Considering the times and Hitler’s rise to power and so forth, it still is interesting the public wanted to hear/read about someone’s love life rather than what was going on with the most important/diabolical individual of the 20th century.