Great Lives

Admiral Lord Collingwood, the eldest son of a Newcastle merchant, went to sea in 1761 at the age of thirteen. In his nearly fifty years in the Navy he rose to become a fine seaman, a master of gunnery, a battle commander the equal of his friend – and rival in love – Nelson. He was also an accomplished writer and wit, a doting father, inveterate gossip and consummate diplomat and strategist.

The popular image of Churchill – grandson of a duke, drinking champagne and smoking a cigar – conjures up a man of wealth and substance. The reality is that Britain's most celebrated 20th-century statesman lived for most of his life on a financial cliff-edge. Only fragments of information about his finances, or their impact on his public life, have previously emerged...

The King is dead: long live the King. In 1509, Henry VII was succeeded by his son Henry VIII, second monarch of the house of Tudor. But this is not the familiar Tudor world of Protestantism and playwrights. Decades before the Reformation, ancient traditions persist: boy bishops, pilgrimage, Corpus Christi pageants, the jewel-decked shrine at Canterbury...

England, late 1547. Henry VIII is dead. His 14-year-old daughter Elizabeth is living with the old king's widow Catherine Parr and her new husband Thomas Seymour. Ambitious, charming and dangerous, Seymour begins an overt flirtation with Elizabeth that ends in her being sent away by Catherine. When Catherine dies in autumn 1548 and Seymour is arrested for treason soon after, the scandal explodes into the open...

Nancy Mitford was, in the words of her sister Lady Diana Mosley, 'very, very complex'. Her biographies and novels, her journalism, and the vast body of letters to her family, friends such as Evelyn Waugh, and to the great love of her life, Gaston Palewski, all tell an intriguing story. Drawing from these, as well as conversations with Mitford's two surviving sisters and colleagues, prize-winning author Laura Thompson has fashioned a portrait of a contradictory and courageous woman.