Press and Reviews

Press

2008

The New York Times: September 27, 2008
An earlier Spencer, eerily similar troubles
Born to one of the richest families in England, she married into a clan that was even wealthier and more eminent. Her husband was nearly a decade older and never pretended to feel anything close to the romantic love she yearned for. Instead he took a mistress. But if he didn't want his wife, just about........................
TIMESONLINE: 20th September 2008
How to get dressed: tailoring

Discussing her new film, The Duchess, Keira Knightley revealed that the rigid 18th-century corsets made her and co-star Hayley Atwell belch constantly, and constricted their frames to the point where they couldn’t breathe....................
MailOnline: 21st September 2008
How Fergie and the Duchess in the hit movie are directly related through an illegitimate child

In a heart-rending scene in the hit movie, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, gives away her love child by a future Prime Minister . . . and incredibly, today we can reveal how that abandoned child is directly related to the Duchess of York and her two daughters....................
Wmagazine: September 2008
Duchess Treat
Move aside, Marie Antoinette, and make way for the enchanting Georgiana
According to Amanda Foreman’s Whitbread Prize–winning 1998 biography of the fifth Duchess of Devonshire, Georgiana Spencer Cavendish had a bridal trousseau consisting of 65 pairs of shoes, 48 pairs of stockings and 26 “and a half” sets of gloves, not to mention scores of incredible....................
Daily Telegraph: August 2008
Princess Diana and the Duchess of Devonshire: Striking similarities
Amanda Foreman, whose best-selling book, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire, was the inspiration for the new film, says: “You can’t deny there are....................
Tatler Magazine: August 2008
High Society by Lucy Moore
Using Foreman’s book and contemporary portraits as inspiration, costume designer Michael O’Connor made everything for the film as authentic as possible. “The trim on the dresses was stripped, sewed, frayed and pulled by hand, exactly as it would have been in the 1770s. Nothing was wasted, “ he says. Even Georgiana’s exquisite corsets, in pistachio or almond silk, and the brown cotton-covered steel frames for the wide hoop skirts of the period (never even shown on film) are marvels of....................
Independent: July 8th 2008 John Walsh
So what if Amanda Foreman was snapped au naturel? You'd see more flesh at a duchess's dinner party
Poor Amanda Foreman. Ten years ago, she published her first book, a biography of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, won the Whitbread prize and picked up rave reviews – deservedly so; her subject was a fascinating woman whose reckless extravagance represented the peak of 18th-century aristocratic excess. I liked the detail that the duchess and her set pronounced words oddly, so that "balcony" was "ball-coe-knee". I liked Foreman's description of the duchess, a shocking gambler, undoing her necklace and flinging it on the table during a card game..........................
Evening Standard: July 2008
A Londoner's Diary
I flew into London from New York last week, where I have been living for the past few years, to discover from The Guardian that I was guilty of a capital offence. The normally sane and sage Kathryn Hughes had declared that she had found the murdered body of Biography behind a pile of books in the library. Furthermore, she knew who the killer was – namely me. She even had the photographs to prove it. The Sunday Times launched its own investigation into this vexing mystery, wanting to know.........................
Sunday Times: July 6, 2008 Maurice Chittenden
Bitchiness breaks out in world of biography
Calm down, ladies! The author Amanda Foreman is being accused of turning the genteel world of historical biography into a playground for glamorous young female writers trying to make a quick killing in the bestseller lists.

Foreman, who posed naked in Tatler magazine behind a pile of books after finding success with her first book Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, published in 1998, is blamed for.............................
Guardian: June 25th 2008
The death of life writing
Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses - whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again, asks Kathryn Hughes..............................
Telegraph: January 2008
Dining rooms are not cut out for modern life
Britons can't be bothered with separate eating areas, says Alice Thomson. We want home cinemas instead

First it was fish knives and finger bowls, next went napkin rings and decanters, then mustard pots and marmalade spoons, now the British are throwing out the entire dining room. We have had enough of them.........................

2007

BBC: 7th October 2007
Hundreds queue for film audition
The Duchess is a chronicle of the life of 18th Century aristocrat Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire.

A casting session for extras was held at Fakenham Methodist Church but so many people attended the doors had to be closed after two hours on Saturday.............................
Daily Mail : 27 July 2007
Keira the dazzling duchess
Keira Knightley will portray one of the most hunted women of her age, a celebrity who married an aristocrat - and just about the only man alive who wasn't in love with her.

No, not Diana, Princess of Wales, but one of her distant kin...........................
Good Housekeeping: 7th June 2007
Remembering Diana: 10 years later, her influence--on her boys, her charities, and the world--lives on.
She appears only in short, tantalizing flashbacks that flicker across the screen and remind you all over again how young and luminous and full of promise she was. But even as a ghost, Diana manages to be more vividly alive than anyone in The Queen, last year's award-winning movie about the extraordinary outpouring of emotion that followed the Princess' death in 1997.

That was the way it always was with Diana, whose star blazed so brightly and whose life was extinguished so suddenly. August 31 will mark the tenth anniversary of that bewildering night when the black Mercedes in which she was traveling slammed into a pillar in the Pont de L'Alma tunnel in Paris, robbing the world of perhaps its most vibrant public personality........................
The Globe and Mail: May 11th 2007
How super is your mom?
For many working mothers, just arriving on time and not covered in unidentified baby detritus is triumph enough. For a small group of women in London, though, simple survival won't do: They are mothers with high-powered jobs in the financial sector, juggling both millions of pounds in assets and more children than will comfortably fit in a Range Rover.

They have been dubbed superwomen, but don't ever call them that to their faces — arranging to have your legs broken would be just one more small task in their day.

Nicola Horlick is one of these women. She is the mother of five surviving children (her eldest child, Georgina, died of leukemia nine years ago). After working at a variety of banks and investment houses, she founded Bramdean Asset Management in London two years ago. Not long before, attacked in her wealthy Knightsbridge neighbourhood, she fought off a mugger who......................

The Daily Mail: 27th February 2007
Why big families really are the best
Historian Amanda Foreman had just published her best-selling biography of the Duchess of Devonshire, when she met her husband. Now the couple have 5 children: Helena, Theodore, Halcyon, Xanthe and Hero. Here she explains why she's convinced............................
Telegraph: 2007
How Elizabeth and co. made history sexy
Why are our cinema screens suddenly heaving with young women of historical importance? Jasper Rees investigates

A year from now, at the 2009 Academy Awards, it is possible to imagine a scenario in which a quartet of young actresses are nominated for playing women from Britain's glorious past.

For the past few years it's been all Elizabeth, the queen famous for strategically guarding her virginity, but in the coming months the big screen will be crowded with history girls who operated a more open-door policy towards sex..........................

2006

The Times: August 31, 2006
Film will recount tragic life of the 18th century Diana
BOTH women died young, were aristocratic icons of an adoring British public and had everything except love. They were also leaders of fashion, had an innate empathy with the poor and were beautiful but plagued by bulimia.

The extraordinary parallels between the late Diana, Princess of Wales, and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, her 18th-century ancestor, are to be reflected in an ambitious new feature film. Georgiana was a Spencer, born in 1757 at Althorp, the ancestral home of Diana in Northampton, where it is hoped that part of the film will be shot...........................

2002

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.....................

2001

Austin Chronicle: February 2, 2001
Amanda Foreman Takes on Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
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....................

Book Reviews

Reviews for Georgiana:

The New York Times: January 2000, by Patricia T O`Conner, New York Times Book Review
"Women of fashion in London are accountable to nobody after they are married."

WOMEN of fashion in London are accountable to nobody after they are married," Lady Teazle says in Sheridan's "School for Scandal". But accountability wasn't the half of it. The real-life model for Lady Teazle, the subject of Amanda Foreman's penetrating and enormously entertaining biography, inhabited a world more fevered and eventful than any comedy of manners.....................
Wall Street Journal: by Ned Crabb. January 2000
"The People`s Duchess."
IMAGINE a beautiful, intelligent, sweet-tempered girl born into the second most powerful family in England, guided firmly at age 17 into marriage with the heir of England's most powerful family, a fellow eight years older, remote, reserved, seemingly unaware of his bride's singular qualities, and very nearly a prisoner of the social and public demands of his title........................
The New Yorker: by Francine Du Plessix Gray. January 2000
"The High Life." "Sex and gambling in Eighteenth-Century England"
By 1779, the year Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, turned twenty-two, she was the most talked-about woman in Great Britain. Her novel "The Sylph", which depicted the sexual license and callousness of her fast set of friends, had gone through four printings, and she had served as the model for Lady Teazle in Richard Sheridan's "The School for Scandal".....................
Vogue: by Jean Nathan. January 2000
"Amanda Foreman takes on the Duchess of Devonshire."
"Moi biography" rang out from the first sentence of Amanda Foreman's Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire (Random House). "Biographers," she writes, "are notorious for falling in love with their subjects." Really?............................
The Evening Standard: Reviewed by Roy Porter
Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
Though her subject is the daughter of an earlier Earl Spencer, Amanda Foreman avoids the temptation to cash in on parallels with a later tragic heroine from that family. And rightly so. Her story of Georgiana Spencer stands squarely on its own two feet, a richly-documented and poignant tale of a remarkable lady............................

The Sunday Times: by Roy Strong 18th May 1998
Hostess with the mostest
This is the story of a daughter of the house of Spencer at Althorp who, at 17, found herself locked into a loveless marriage with a man with whom she had nothing in common. Distant and reserved, he saw her role as producing the male heir and unquestioningly acting the part into which her grand marriage had cast her. The girl in question, however, soon revealed herself as possessing a unique magnetism, attracting every eye in the room. She also set fashion. Left alone, emotionally unfulfilled, she inevitably took a lover.........................
The Daily Telegraph: Philip Ziegler welcomes an accomplished Life of a much-loved woman. May 1998
Legendarily extravagant
She was born a Spencer, was thrust into public life when still almost a child, was married to a man who treated her with cool courtesy and had all too evidently other emotional fish to fry. She exploited the press and her own vibrant personality to establish herself as a celebrity in her own right. In her prime, she was one of the best-known and best-loved women in England. She was......................

Reviews for What Might Have Been:

What Might have Been by Andrew Roberts

Reviews for the Making History Series:

Waterloo by Andrew Roberts
The Awful End of William The Silent by Lisa Jardine
Kristallnacht by Martin Gilbert