My new book Secret Voices is by Batsford at the end of February.
To pre-order from Amazon click here for UK and here for US.
Secret Voices – A Year of Women’s Diaries
The Code That Captured Anne Boleyn
Anne Boleyn has been seen as everything from a femme fatale to a feminist icon, a promiscuous manipulator to a Protestant martyr. The fascination with her has stretched over five centuries. And part of that fascination lies in just how…
Tudors in love: what were the dynasty’s romantic secrets?
Lancelot is desperate to reach Guinevere’s chamber – so desperate that he’s crawled over a bridge made from a sword blade to rescue her. The French poet Chrétien de Troyes describes Lancelot’s fingers shredded to the bone as he wrenches…
Season of Scandals
That famous photograph is lodged in all our memories – Christine Keeler naked, astride a concealing chair. And perhaps we all have our own background with this story. Ok, my husband Derek Malcolm’s memories are a bit more direct than most. As…
Lessons in loving
There are two photographs on the desk Vita Sackville-West kept in the tower of Sissinghurst Castle. One of her husband, the writer and diplomat Harold Nicolson, and one of Virginia Woolf. The brief physical passion Vita and Virginia shared was…
‘Woke’ women and the Sixteenth Century
There’s been a lot of talk about the new Mary Queen of Scots movie – much of it about the historical accuracy. But the most dramatic moments are not necessarily the invented ones. Did Mary Stuart and Elizabeth Tudor…
Meghan’s Match With History
Of course Prince Harry’s marriage to Meghan Markle is in many ways extraordinary. American, of mixed race and divorced – things have changed since Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, surely. But let’s not get carried away. In one very important…
‘A native-born Frenchwoman’: the role Anne Boleyn died to play
If you write about the Tudors, there are two people at whom you want a crack – well, if you’re interested in women’s history, anyway. One is Elizabeth I. (Been there, done that, in several books already.) The other is…
What the Dollar Princesses did for us
In the long twilight of the Victorian age, the British aristocracy quailed at the thought a new era might be about to dawn. One in which they could no longer count on the exclusive access to power they had once…
Braveheart
It’s twenty years ago this week since Mel Gibson’s Braveheart was released. Which makes it twenty one years (yes, I am that old) since I interviewed him about it at the Cannes Film Festival, and then went on the set…
