Matthew Dennison's elegant and magisterial biography of Her late Majesty, updated following the death of Elizabeth II and the accession of King Charles III.'A worthy and balanced overview of the Queen's life. Dennison is especially good on her childhood... quietly, tactfully, tastefully reverent.'The TimesThe death of Queen Elizabeth II on 8 September 2022 was more than just a moment of profound sadness; her passing marked the end of an era in our n...

A fresh, witty, accessible life of Queen Victoria. Not since Lytton Strachey has the irony, contradictions and influence of this Queen been treated with such flourish or biographical insight.'Queen Victoria had a very complicated and psychologically fascinating personality and only a very talented biographer could get to the key of her character. Fortunately in Matthew Dennison's pithy, well-researched, beautifully written and very accessible book, she has found one' Andrew Roberts...

One of them was a military genius### one murdered his mother and fiddled while Rome burned. Six of their number were assassinated, two committed suicide, and five of them were elevated to the status of gods. They have come to be known as the 'twelve Caesars' - Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, Galba, Otho, Vitellius, Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. Under their rule, Rome was transformed from a republic to an empire, whose model of regal autocracy would survive in ...

This "beautifully written . . . disarmingly impressive" biography sheds light on the peculiar life of Queen Victoria's youngest daughter ( Daily Telegraph , UK).Born on April 14th, 1857, Princess Beatrice was the last child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. After her father died when she was four, Beatrice became the queen's source of comfort and consolation, a role which required her complete submission. Her mother's o...

'A brilliant study of a brilliant woman' LUCY WORSLEYHistory has forgotten Caroline of Ansbach, yet in her lifetime she was compared frequently to Elizabeth I and considered by some as ‘the cleverest queen consort Britain ever had’.The intellectual superior of her buffoonish husband George II, Caroline is credited with hastening the Enlightenment to Britain through her sponsorship of red-hot debates about science, religion, philosophy and t...

Matthew Dennison creates a revealing portrait of the brave and charismatic Vita, in the first biography of her to be written for thirty years.Vita Sackville-West was a woman who defied categorisation. She was the dispossessed girl whose lonely childhood at Knole inspired enduring feats of imagination, the celebrated author and poet, the adored and affectionate wife whose marriage included passionate homosexual affairs (most famously with Virginia Woolf ), and the recluse who found ...

Rome is a subject of endless fascination, and in this new biography of the infamous Empress Livia, Matthew Dennison brings to life a woman long believed to be one of the most feared villainesses of history.Second wife of the emperor Augustus, mother of his successor Tiberius, grandmother of Claudius and great grandmother of Caligula, the empress Livia lived close to the center of Roman political power for eight turbulent decades. Her life spanned the years of Rome's transfo...

Beatrice Mary Victoria Feodore, later Princess Henry of Battenberg, was the last-born – in 1866 – of Victoria and Albert's children, and she would outlive all of her siblings to die as recently as 1944. Her childhood coincided with her mother's extended period of mourning for her prematurely deceased husband, a circumstance which may have contributed to Victoria's determination to keep her youngest daughter as close to her as possible.She would eventually marry Prince Henry of Batt...

Empress of Rome is the fascinating biography of one of the most perplexing and powerful figures of the ancient world: the empress Livia. Second wife of the emperor Augustus and the mother of his successor Tiberius, Livia has been vilified by posterity (most notably by Tacitus and Robert Graves) as the quintessence of the scheming Roman matriarch, poisoning her relatives one by one to smooth her son's path to the imperial throne.In this elegant and rigorously researched biography, M...

'A brilliant study of a brilliant woman' LUCY WORSLEYHistory has forgotten Caroline of Ansbach, yet in her lifetime she was compared frequently to Elizabeth I and considered by some as ‘the cleverest queen consort Britain ever had’.The intellectual superior of her buffoonish husband George II, Caroline is credited with hastening the Enlightenment to Britain through her sponsorship of red-hot debates about science, religion, philosophy and t...

Aristocrat, literary celebrity, ‘Rose Queen’, devoted wife, lesbian, recluse, iconoclast – Vita Sackville-West was many things, but she was never straightforward. Her life is re-told here in a dazzling new biography.In this stunning portrait of Vita Sackville-West, Matthew Dennison traces the triumph and contradictions of Vita’s extraordinary life. His narrative charts a fascinating course from Vita’s lonely childhood at Knole, through her affectionate but ‘open’ marriage to Harold...

A fresh, witty, accessible life of Queen Victoria. Not since Lytton Strachey has the irony, contradictions and influence of this Queen been treated with such flourish or biographical insight.Reigning over a lifetime, Queen Victoria embodied the spirit of the contradictory era to which she lent her name. She championed modern art and photography but resisted education for the working classes and woman’s suffrage; she advocated cultural imperialism, tempered by imperial compassion; i...