Dancing to the Precipice

comprehensive and absorbing biography

Clare Colvin, Independent

Moorehead has an eye for the detail... The book sparkles with gems about life at the court of Marie-Antoinette

Hugh MacDonald, The Herald

The attraction of Moorehead's biography lies in her seamless fusion of Lucie's warm subjectivity with a broad historical canvas of bitter turmoil.

Siofra Pierse, Irish Times

Utterly captivating... brings to life both Lucie and the glorious and terrible years through which she lived with a novelistic vividness, full of sights and sounds and flavours

Sunday Times

A rich and satisfying book which not only adds to our appreciation of Madame de la Tour du Pin's story but brings the whole tumultuous period and its characters to life

Spectator

An excellent, lively biography, full of background detail

Standpoint

Never less than a gripping story of an extraordinary life

Literary Review

Here is the latest from Caroline Moorhead whose work is never less than rigorously and beautifully composed

Daily Express

A scintillating biography...Moorehead succeeds triumphantly [and] brings an assured grip on contemporary politics and a colourful sense of place

Daily Telegraph

romantic adventure, staged in colourful historical settings...moral tale

Biancamaria Fontana, Times Literary Supplement

Lucie de la Tour de Pin has found a biographer worthy of her own storytelling skills. With a light-handed touch, Moorehead sets Lucie's story in its wider social and historical context, sketching the complicated political twists and turns in a way that makes them memorable without ever dumbing down

Kathryn Hughes, Mail on Sunday

Moorehead's biography, drawing on a trove of previously unpublished correspondence, captures the rhythm of the radical contrasts in her subject's like

The New Yorker

This utterly captivating biography brings to life, with novelistic vividness, both Lucie [de la Tour du Pin] and the glorious and terrible years through which she lived

Christopher Hart, The Sunday Times

It's not uncommon to enjoy a novel and want to read more novels by that author; it's less common to think the same about a biography, but after reading Dancing to the Precipice, I definitely want to read more biographies by Moorhead

Brandon Robshaw, Independent on Sunday

It is in describing Lucie's world in this biography so admirably succeeds

Contemporary Reviews

Enthralling look at the sharp-eyed 19th-century memoirist Lucie de la Tour du Pin.

Sunday Times Summer Reading