Interviews

Picture of Amanda Foreman January 2001 © Amanda Foreman Amanda Foreman has been the subject of many interviews during the publication of her book "Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.

23rd October 2009
Women's Hour - BBC
How the Hollywood film industry was affected by the Communist scare of the 1940s & 50s.
The McCarthy witch-hunts have become known as one of the most shameful periods in American history. During the beginnings of the Cold War in the 1940s & 50s the search for ‘Reds under the bed’ began. Led by the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy it was felt most fiercely in Hollywood where the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee were carried out under the full glare of the media. Over 300 people in the entertainment industry including Leonard Bernstein, Charlie Chaplin, Aaron Copland, Carl Foreman and high profile women like Lillian Hellman, and Dorothy Parker were blacklisted because of their beliefs - real or suspected and were denied employment. Jenni is joined by Amanda Foreman, daughter of the blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter Carl Foreman and biographer of Georgiana the Duchess of Devonshire, and Michael Freedland, author of Witch-hunt in Hollywood. to look back at this period.
Sunday Express: September, 2008
Author Returns to Form
"IN A funny, weird way I feel as if my life might be channelled to Georgiana's, " says Amanda Foreman, jovially. The author of the blockbusting historical biography about the 18th-century Duchess of Devonshire....................
The Telegraph: September 8th 2008
I feared I would never walk again
How 'The Duchess' author Amanda Foreman survived a split pelvis....................
The Times: September 8th 2008
Fame and fortune: Amanda Foreman
The biographer’s heroine had no sense of money....................
The Times: September 8th 2008
Relative Values: Amanda Foreman and her brother, Jonathan
Amanda Foreman, 40, is the author of the bestselling biography Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. She is married to a banker, Jonathan Barton, and lives in New York and London. She has five children, the oldest of whom is six. The Duchess, a film based on her book starring Keira Knightley and Ralph Fiennes, is out now...................

The Daily Telegraph Magazine: 2003
Interview with Amanda Foreman
Foreman, 34, rose to fame five years ago when she published her first biography, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and posed nude for Tatler magazine as part of the publicity campaign. In 1998 Georgiana won the Whitbread Biography Award and sales have since topped 750,000. Her second book, A World on Fire.....................
The Daily Telegraph: Wednesday 21 August, 2002
Falling for a man you can bank on
ARTY, bohemian women often spend their younger years dating fellow writers, painters and creative spirits - so why do so many of them settle down with much more traditional types? Appearances can be deceptive, explains Mary Killen,

There comes a moment in the life of a bohemian young woman-about-town when.....................
`Georgiana' exudes character: March 8, 2001
By Deirdre Donahue USA Today

For eight years, Oxford graduate student Amanda Foreman labored away on a biography about an obscure English aristocrat, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, who lived during the licentious reign of George III.

"There was a total lack of interest", says Foreman, 32, while on vacation in the Caribbean.

Today, the critically admired biography is a best seller in Britain and the USA.....................
Ahead of her time: Feb 11, 2001
By Fritz Lanham, Houston Chronicle
Yes, biographer Amanda Foreman agrees, laughingly. These people were different from you and me. For one thing, they lived on a different schedule, rolling out of bed at 1 or 2 in the afternoon and supping at midnight. That followed the hours of music, drinking, and high-stakes gambling - lordy, such gambling - before bedtime at sunup.

They were rich, they were politically powerful and their love lives require a chart to fathom. For a time the women sported hairstyles so preposterously tall as to make Marge Simpson’s look like a buzzcut.....................
The High Life: Feb 2, 2001
An interview by Amanda Eyre Ward fror The Austin Chronicle Books.
Imagine Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, preparing for a night out on the town. It is 1775, and she has fashioned a three-foot tower on her head, using scented pomade to affix pads of horsehair on top of her own hair. She has just thought of the idea of making tiny wooden ships to adorn her horsehair wig, and has called to her servants. It will take the help of at least two hairdressers and many hours to create Georgiana’s sensational hairdo, and yet, notes Amanda Foreman in her riveting biography, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.....................
W Magazine: By James Fallon. February 2000
Chasing the Duchess
"Glamorous biographer Amanda Foreman and her glamorous subject have taken London by storm."
Amanda Foreman knew she'd finally shaken the Duchess's ghost when she stopped dreaming about her.

The 31-year-old historian admits that while researching and writing her book Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (just out from Random House), she was obsessed with her subject, who in the late 18th century was the undisputed leader of fashionable society. Georgiana also was a distant relative and forerunner of a present-day fashion icon - the late Diana, Princess of Wales.....................
The New York Daily News: by Ellen Tumposky in London. January 2000
"With a single photo, an American scholar has created quite a stir in Britain."
Writing about the first media celebrity has made biographer Amanda Foreman something of a celebrity herself, and she's still reeling from the experience.

Foreman, 31, is the author of "Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire" (Random House, $29.95), a biography of Georgiana Spencer, an 18th-century British aristocrat who was Princess Diana's great-great-great-great aunt........................
The First Celebrity: 1999
An interview with Amanda Foreman published by Harper Collins©
Amanda Foreman quite literally grew up amid her father's film sets (she is the daughter of Carl Foreman) and is today a research fellow at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. She has written for various publications, including the New York Times, and her first book, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire became an immediate bestseller.......................
Elle Magazine: By Lynne Tillman. December 1999
"How a scandalous Eighteenth-Century Duchess helped a rebellious Twentieth-Century scholar understand herself, her father and her times.
"When Amanda Foreman was twenty-four and a graduate student at Oxford University, she came across a letter written by an eighteenth-century English aristocrat, Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire. Foreman had been researching English attitudes about race in the eighteenth-century, but she found herself instantly drawn to Georgiana, the high-spirited young woman who`s arranged marriage to one of the most powerful men in England thrust.........................
Evening Standard Magazine: Interview by Anna Pursglove. December 1999
Historian and biographer Amanda Foreman thinks London cab drivers are the best in the world and its underground the worst
What's your idea of a perfect weekend in London?
A weekend that includes shopping, dinner at the Savoy and a trip to the theatre.

What did you dream about last night?
I had lots of dreams last night. One of them was definitely about travelling (I travel between New York and London a lot). I think I was worrying about getting somewhere on time......................
The Guardian: Interview by Stephen Moss. November 1999
Spot the historian
Amanda Foreman is better looking than most historians and her book on Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire - shortlisted for the Whitbread - is pretty good too.

Gibbon set the standard for historians, not least in appearance. "He was ugly, and his features were so overlaid by fat as t be almost grotesque", according to the Dictionary of National Biography. Nice lex, shame about the face. So an attractive historian causes a bit of a stir - it has the same incongruous appeal as a supermodel with a PhD in astrophysics.

Amanda Foreman has caused just such a stir..........................
The Daily Telegraph: November 1998
Labour of love for a Diana of the Whig
Boris Johnson muses on the whereabouts of the modern Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire.
O Amanda, I say, as we huddle for warmth on a bench at Paddington station. Alack and fie for our generation! The Friday afternoon human traffic flows past us on the platform pinched, put upon. Why are we so anaemic by comparison with our forebears?

Maybe it's just me but I can't think of anyone nowadays who lives like her heroine, Georgiana the Duchess of Devonshire. Amanda Foreman has rediscovered the life of the Queen of the Ton, as London's high society was known in 1780: the routs, the revels, the balls that went on into the next day; her sapphic affair with her husband's mistress, and what seems to have been a liaison with.......................
The Sunday Times: Georgina Howell. April 1998
She was a Spencer, adored by all but her husband. She was beautiful, but plagued by bulimia. She lived 200 years ago, yet Georgiana`s life uncannily paralleled that of her famous Twentieth-Century descendant, Diana.
Standing under the gilded octagonal dome of Chiswick House with Amanda Foreman, a 29-year-old blonde in a biker jacket and jeans, I watch her trying, for my sake, to summon the ghost of someone who once lived here. She is a historian with a sense of theatre. Sticking her hands into her pockets, she paces the ground slowly, and talks me in. "Chiswick was just a country cottage to her", she says. "Her husband owned seven estates, including Chatsworth, Burlington House and Devonshire House. But Chiswick was her favourite. She called it her "earthly paradise".

"Even as I talk to you, I can feel her so near to us", she says. "Each time we enter a room, she has just left it....................