‘[A] blissful book – it’s like basking in the warm Med’ – Rachel Johnson, Mail on Sunday

The 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.

Bringing ‘the Tudor Age to exuberant life’ (Hugh Massingberd, Mail on Sunday), Mary S. Lovell tells the story of Bess of Hardwick,, one of the most remarkable women of the Tudor era. Gently-born in reduced circumstances, she was married at 15 and when she was widowed at 16, she was still a virgin. At 19 she married a man more than twice her age, Sir William Cavendish, a senior auditor in King Henry VIII’s Court of Augmentations. Responsible for seizing church properties for the crown during the Dissolution, Cavendish enriched himself in the process. During the reign of King Edward VI, Cavendish was the Treasurer to the boy king and sisters, and he and Bess moved in the highest levels of society. They had a London home and built Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. After Cavendish’s death her third husband was poisoned by his brother. Bess’ fourth marriage to the patrician George, 6th Earl of Shrewsbury, Earl Marshall of England, made Bess one of the most important women at court. Her shrewd business acumen was a byword, and she was said to have ‘a masculine understanding’, in that age when women had little education and few legal rights. The Earl’s death made her arguably the wealthiest, and therefore – next to the Queen – the most powerful woman in the country.

‘This wonderfully researched book is an intimate portrait of [Bess’s] life and a vivid insight into life in Tudor society’ Sunday Express

‘Engrossing from beginning to end’ Vogue

‘Fascinating, the way all great family stories are fascinating’ New York Times Book Review

Even 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.