Mary S. Lovell – författare

''A sensational saga'' Mail on Sunday''A cracking read'' Lynn Barber, Observer''Engrossing from beginning to end'' Vogue''Fascinating, the way all great family stories are fascinating'' New York Times Book ReviewEven if the six daughters, born between 1904 and 1920, of the charming, eccentric David, Lord Redesdale and his wife Sydney had been quite ordinary women, the span of their lives - encompassing the most traumatic century in Britain''s history - and the status to which they were born, would have made their story a fascinating one. But Nancy, Pamela, Diana, Unity, Decca and Debo, ''the mad, mad Mitfords'', were far from ordinary.

When she disappeared in 1937 over a shark-infested sea, Amelia Earhart had lived up to her wish - internationally famous, a daring and pioneering aviator, and ambassador extraordinary for the United States. Married to a man with a genius for publicity, her life was crowded, demanding and adventurous. Mary S. Lovell''s superb biography examines a legend to reveal the pressures and influences that drove Amelia, and shows how her life, career and manner of death foreshadowed the tragedies and excesses of a media-dominated age.

A biography of one of the most remarkable women of the Tudor era - next to Queen Elizabeth the most powerful woman in EnglandBess of Hardwick, born into the most brutal and turbulent period of England''s history, did not have an auspicious start in life. Widowed for the first time at sixteen, she nonetheless outlived four monarchs, married three more times, and died one of the wealthiest and most powerful women the country has ever seen. The Tudor age was a hazardous time for an ambitious woman: by the time Frances, Bess''s first child, was six, three of her illustrious godparents had been beheaded. Plague regularly wiped out entire families, conspiracies and feuds were rife. But through all this Bess Hardwick bore eight children and built an empire of her own: the great houses of Chatsworth and Hardwick. ''The best account yet of this shrewd, enigmatic and remarkable woman'' Sunday Times''Lovell has excelled at bringing the Tudor age to exuberant life. A phenomenal story'' Mail on Sunday''Utterly absorbing... one of those biographies in which the reader really doesn''t want the subject to die'' Independent on Sunday

There never was a Churchill from John of Marlborough down who had either morals or principles'', so said Gladstone. From the First Duke of Marlborough - soldier of genius, restless empire-builder and cuckolder of Charles II - onwards, the Churchills have been politicians, gamblers and profligates, heroes and womanisers.The Churchills is a richly layered portrait of an extraordinary set of men and women - grandly ambitious, regularly impecunious, impulsive, arrogant and brave. And towering above the Churchill clan is the figure of Winston - his failures and his triumphs shown in a new and revealing context - ultimately our ''greatest Briton''.

Richard Burton was a brilliant, charismatic man - a unique blend of erudite scholar and daring adventurer. Fluent in twenty-nine languages, he found it easy to pass himself off as a native, thereby gaining unique insight into societies otherwise closed to Western scrutiny. He followed service as an intelligence officer in India by a daring penetration of the sacred Islamic cities of Mecca and Medina disguised as a pilgrim. He was the first European to enter the forbidden African city of Harar, and discovered Lake Tanganyika in his search for the source of the Nile. His fascination with, and research into, the intimate customs of ethnic races (which would eventually culminate in his brilliant Kama Sutra) earned him a racy reputation in that age of sexual repression.Little surprise, then, that Isabel Arundell''s aristocratic mother objected to her daughter''s marriage to this most notorious of figures. Isabel, however, was a spirited, independent-minded woman and was also deeply, passionately in love with Richard. Against all expectations but their own, the Burtons enjoyed a remarkably successful marriage.

Beryl Markham, like Karen Blixen, could only have come out of Africa. Pioneering aviatrix, flamboyant beauty, brilliant race-horse trainer, unscrupulous seducer - her life story is for every reader who was enthralled by Blixen''s exotic world, that of Kenya between the wars. This fully authorised biography, drawn from the author''s personal association with Beryl and her family, paints a vivid portrait of a tempestuous and controversial character. It tells of her friendship with Karen Blixen (though she commandeered Blixen''s husband Bror and lover Denys Finch Hatton), of her spectacular courage when she became the first person to fly from England to America, and of the mysteries surrounding her highly praised, bestselling book WEST WITH THE NIGHT.

''I loved every word'' Sarra Manning, Red''[A] blissful book - it''s like basking in the warm Med'' Rachel Johnson, Mail on SundayThe Riviera Set is the story of the group of people who lived, partied, bed-hopped and politicked at the Château de l''Horizon near Cannes, over the course of forty years from the time when Coco Chanel made southern French tans fashionable in the twenties to the death of the playboy Prince Aly Khan in 1960. At the heart of this was the amazing Maxine Elliott, the daughter of a fisherman from Connecticut, who built the beautiful art deco Château and brought together the likes of Noel Coward, the Aga Khan, the Windsors and two very saucy courtesans, Doris Castlerosse and Daisy Fellowes, who set out to be dangerous distractions to Winston Churchill as he worked on his journalism and biographies during his ''wilderness years'' in the thirties.After the War the story continued as the Château changed hands and Prince Aly Khan used it to entertain the Hollywood set, as well as launch his seduction of and eventual marriage to Rita Hayworth.Mary Lovell tells her story of high society behaviour with tremendous brio and relish, and this book has all the charm and fascination of her bestselling The Mitford Girls and The Churchills.

The legend of Betty Pack is simple enough. She was a beautiful American spy recruited first by the British Secret lntelligence Service in 1938 and later by the American OSS. Her method of obtaining information was singular: seduction. In Cast No Shadow Mary Lovell, author of Straight On Till Morning, the internationally acclaimed and best-selling biography of Beryl Markham, gives us for the first time the complete story behind the legend of this modern-day Mata Hari, a story more astounding than the legend.Betty Pack''s milieu was the aristocratic world of international diplomatic society The wife of a career British diplomat-the marriage for both partners had quickly become an arrangement of convenience, not passion - Betty would be witness to and participant in many of the most intense historic moments of the twentieth century: in civil war-torn Madrid, besieged Warsaw occupied Paris, wartime Washington. In each locale, Betty''s entrée into diplomatic circles and her own penchant for seeking out men at the center of conflict made her a spy whose love of adventure was matched only by her talent for uncovering the enemy''s secrets. Betty often knew what information her spymasters wanted; more important, she knew whom to approach and seduce in order to obtain it.Relying on top-secret and heretofore unrevealed documents from British Intelligence as well as on Betty''s own memoir written shortly before her death, Mary Lovell offers a remarkable portrait of a woman whose adeptness for intrigue in affairs of espionage and passion is astonishing. Cast No Shadow is a story of subterfuge and romantic expediency the exposes the hidden human intrigue of World War II and the life of a woman whose contribution to the Allied effort was invaluable and unique.