My favourite biography is Nancy Mitford's Madame de Pompadour - a famous 18th-century French beauty who became Louis XV's mistress. The secret of a good biography is not just to tell the person's story but to create the world in which they lived.
Julian Fellowes, Daily Express

Mitford brings warmth to everything she touches, and her biography of Madame de Pompadour is testimony to that
Justine Picardie, Sunday Telegraph

Reads as if an enchantingly clever woman was pouring out the story to me on the telephone
Raymond Mortimer,

Nancy Mitford excels in depicting both the brilliant romantic showcase and the recessed world of power... No historian writing in English has given a better pen-picture of Versailles in its heyday
Time

Incontestably her best book, Madame de Pompadour is beautifully written in a rapid, nervous, gay and enthusiastic manner which carries the reader through from first page to last
Cyril Connolly, Sunday Times

A wonderful story and Miss Mitford has told it with her own lightness and skill
Observer