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...

A dazzling new biography of Vita Sackville-West, the 20th century aristocrat, literary celebrity, devoted wife, famous lover of Virginia Woolf, recluse, and iconoclast who defied categorization.In this stunning new biography of Vita Sackville-West, Matthew Dennison's Behind the Mask 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 bu...

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 vivid history of Rome and its rulers "combines thoughtful reflection and analysis with gossipy irreverence in a bewitching cocktail" ( Daily Express, UK).One was a military genius, one murdered his mother and fiddled while Rome burned, another earned the nickname "sphincter artist". Six of them were assassinated, two committed suicide—and five were considered gods. They are known as the "twelve Caesars" —Julius Caesar, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Cl...

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...

"An insightful, short look at the life of an immortal if only sometimes-admirable queen" ( Kirkus Reviews )."A concise book [with] the confidence of considerable research, well digested and well delivered. . . . Perfect." — The Times (UK)Queen Victoria is Britain's queen of contradictions. With her combination of deep sentimentality and bombast, cultural ...

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...

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...

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...