England's Mistress

From Soho tart to glamour model, diplomatic wife in Naples to the most famous extra-marital passion in UK history: Emma Hamilton's amazing tale is hardly unfamiliar. Williams tells it shrewdly and well, with access to recently discovered letters and a sharp contemporary spin. In her skilled hands, Lord Nelson's lover, for all her "charisma, intelligence and charm" falls foul both of ingrained misogyny and a fledgling culture that both gave her stardom and exacted a fearsome price.

The Independent

Lively, sympathetic and meticulously researched

Sunday Telegraph

Williams account is both balanced and evocative...[Emma Hamilton's] ruthless but romantic pursuit of celebrity is so close to our own time that the story barely needs contemporary parallels

Sunday Times

This rich and bouncy biography of a driven woman - mad for fashion, mad on passion - makes Posh look like a novice

Good Housekeeping

Gallops along like a gripping novel, with an utterly believable and sympathetic character at its heart

Chesire Life

Utterly absorbing ... tantalizing

City AM

Reveals the woman behind the myths

Northern Echo

It is the thoroughness of the research and attention to detail that make Kate Williams' new biography of Emma Hamilton so interesting. The iconic Emma has been continuously reimagined since her lover Nelson's death, but Williams offers a new portrait

The Independent

Sparkling like Emma's pawned diamonds ... Finally makes us understand why Nelson needed to be prised out of Emma's embrace to fight Napoleon...

Daily Mail

A wonderful sparkling biography

Amanda Foreman, author of Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire

In this pacey retelling of a classic love story, Kate Williams has created a sparkling life worthy of Emma herself. A new biography for a new generation

Stella Tillyard, author of A Royal Affair

Popular history at its best

David Liss, author of A Spectacle of Corruption

Kate Williams has done a wonderful job recreating the life of the woman she wants us to relate to...This is an immensely colourful, readable portrait that revels in Emma's resilience and her ability to surmount what look to us now to be unimaginable odds

Independent on Sunday

Every intricate detail is laid out, and Kate Williams' writing is so immediate, you feel all but transported...

Birmingham Post

Divertingly and instructively illuminates a time and culture both far away and intriguingly like our own, and resurrects a woman whose mingled vulnerability and resilience - to say nothing of her glamour - still have the power to fascinate

Washington Post

The first self-made superstar, the first manipulative media celebrity, dazzling Europe with her style and beauty as muse to artists and mistress to Nelson ... Emma famously gets her comeuppance, and her headlong flight to romantic destruction is told with novelistic dash

The Times