As for the Windsors themselves, endless ink has already been spilled trying to get to the bottom of them. I recommend Anne Sebba’s That Woman and Philip Ziegler’s King Edward VIII for a wealth of biographical information and psychological insight into one of the most notorious couples of the century, as well as Andrew Morton’s 17 Carnations for an examination of the case against the Windsors’ activities—and possibly their loyalties—during the Second World War. I have tried to be fair, however, and the short memoir The Windsors I Knew, written by Jean Hardcastle-Taylor (formerly Miss Drewes, the Windsors’ private secretary during their Bahamas years, who makes a few appearances in The Golden Hour) provides a fascinating counterpoint to the largely negative portrait of the couple that emerges from history. Many of the details of everyday life inside Government House—including the red bows tied around the necks of the Windsors’ beloved Cairn terriers during the Christmas season—come from this invaluable source.

As for the larger historical context of the Bahamas, I consulted a variety of sources, both popular and academic, in trying to understand the racial and social history of the colony. I count Gail Saunders’s Race and Class in the Colonial Bahamas, 1880–1960 as the most comprehensive study, but Owen Platt’s The Royal Governor . . . and the Duchess and Sir Orville Turnquest’s What Manner of Man Is This? The Duke of Windsor’s Years in The Bahamas lent crucial details and insight. I also spent hours scouring old maps and sources to imagine Nassau and New Providence Island as they existed decades ago, before the enormous development that took place in the postwar years. While The Golden Hour is not, and was not intended to be, a scholarly history of the Bahamas and the Windsors, I’ve striven to re-create this setting and its real-life inhabitants as accurately as possible.

As for the scenes in wartime Europe, I’m indebted to Lynne Olson’s excellent and absorbing books—Last Hope Island and Citizens of London, for starters—for providing context and spurring my imagination, and to Max Hastings’s The Secret War for further background on the intelligence services during the Second World War. To understand the operation of the escape lines that channeled Allied pilots and other refugees out of German-occupied territories, I read Peter Eisner’s exhilarating The Freedom Line, which I highly recommend as a first-class example of narrative nonfiction.