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	Lola Montez: Her Life & Conquests Unearthing the truth about a compulsive liar, a notorious Spanish dancer who couldn't dance and wasn't Spanish, who fibbed, fought and fornicated her way around the world, must present a considerable challenge to a biographer. Happily, it is one to which James Morton rises with verve and style... Read the rest of this review published in The Sunday Times here.
	Sovereign Ladies by Maureen Waller. Maureen Waller's main concern in her readable and engaging examination of England's six "queens regnant" is with their womanhood. How did Mary I (Mary Tudor or Bloody Mary), Elizabeth I, Mary II (better known as one half of William and Mary), her sister Queen Anne and the Queen-Empress Victoria manage, and how does Elizabeth II still cope, with the challenges and contradictions inherent in the dual nature of being both "sovereign" and "lady"?... Read the rest of this review published in The Sunday Times here.
	"Vodka, more vodka!" - the composer who feared his head would fall off.  Tchaikovsky: The Man And His Music is the distillation of David Brown's prodigious knowledge of Tchaikovsky's life and works, previously presented to scholars in four volumes. This more accessible volume is directed at readers "who may claim little or no musical competence", and can either be read as straight biography or used as a listening guide... Read the rest of this review published in The Independent here.
	Love and Louis XIV.  Antonia Fraser long ago mastered the art of writing meticulous history so that it reads like an engrossing novel, and her latest offering is no exception... Read the rest of this review published in The Sunday Times here.
	All fine and dandy? Was Benjamin Disraeli gay? This is not a new question, nor does William Kuhn, professor of history at Carthage College near Lake Michigan, suggest that it is. What he does claim to be different about his approach is the particular use he makes of Disraeli's novels to find evidence both of the politician's "unusual sexuality" and of his daring to hint at it in public. If Disraeli was indeed homosexual, and if he did "flirt with revealing this" in his novels, then, says Kuhn, our whole view of Victorian society, which was prepared to accept this dandyish, effeminate, Christianised Jew as prime minister for two periods of office needs to change... Read the rest of this review published in The Sunday Times here.
	How Stalin inspired Muscovites in the darkest days of battle with Hitler. "The Bolsheviks are lucky. God is on their side." Not, perhaps, words one would have attributed to Joseph Stalin, but they indicate his gift for understanding his people's mood in a crisis. He also knew how to appeal to a Russian patriotism so closely allied to the Orthodox religion, by invoking saints, sacred and military, from Alexander Nevsky to Field Marshal Kutuzov. The contradictions of the Soviet Union's wartime leader come into stark relief in Rodric Braithwaite's engrossing and masterly account of the battle for Moscow from summer 1941 until spring 1942... Read the rest of this review published in The Independent here.
	Mistress of all the arts. The voice of the dwarf Bucino Teodoldi opens the story with characteristic energy: "My lady, Fiammetta Bianchini, was plucking her eyebrows and biting colour into her lips when the unthinkable happened and the Holy Roman emperor's army blew a hole in the wall of God's eternal city, letting in a flood of half-starved, half-crazed troops bent on pillage and punishment." As a valued and expensive courtesan, the 23-year-old Fiammetta has been living a life of great luxury and refinement in Rome; her latest patron is a highly-placed cardinal. But the date is May 6 1527 and the Roman idyll is about to end, as Habsburg mercenaries sack the city... Read the rest of this review published in The Guardian here.
	Catherine Merridale specialises in the unearthing of buried memories. In her Night of Stone, the focus was on the relatives of so-called "enemies of the people" in the Soviet Union, forbidden to mourn their loved ones. In Ivan's War, she collects the stories of men and women who fought in the Red Army during the "Great Patriotic War"... Read the rest of this review published in The Independent here.
	"The biography of Voltaire has become a palimpsest, each new version being written over the many that have gone before," says Roger Pearson. His own version of this extraordinary writer, philosophe, human-rights campaigner and entrepreneur is sparklingly witty and eminently readable... Read the rest of this review published in The Sunday Times here.
	The story opens in 1895 with a New York society wedding at the fashionable church of St Thomas on Fifth Avenue.  The bride-to-be is the 18-year-old heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, the daughter of the recently divorced but still socially prominent and highly ambitious Alva, and the groom is the 24-year-old 9th Duke of Marlborough, Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill, known as 'Sunny'... Read the rest of this review published in The Sunday Times here.