“Was the Duchess of Windsor a man?” shouted the newspaper placards earlier this year after publication of The Duchess of Windsor by Michael Bloch (Weidenfeld and Nicholson, £18.19). The book makes two main assertions: that the duchess, though married three times, never had normal full sexual relations with any of her husbands or lovers and “may have died a virgin” and that she had some condition which made it impossible for her ever to have children. The press stories suggested that some of the evidence for these claims came from an unnamed doctor who had been given the details by another doctor who had …