The Six Wives of Henry VIII sold over 150,000 copies in hardback alone. This is Antonia Fraser's first full-scale biography, as opposed to a composite study, for nearly twenty years.

Did Marie Antoinette really say, about the suffering French populace, "Let them eat cake" - or was she compassionate and caring? Did her husband need an operation to consummate their marriage, some considerable time after the actual wedding? In this biography of the apparently much maligned French Queen, Antonia Fraser answers such questions whilst putting up a general defence of a woman whose actual life has become submerged in popular myth. For Fraser, her subject's reputation for extravagance, aristocratic haughtiness and sexual profligacy has a distinctly misogynistic bias - and is not borne out by the facts. Basically convincing if occasionally protesting too much for the defence, this is a characteristically readable as well as densely grounded slice of history. It's especially intriguing to read about her childhood as one of the children of the Empress Maria Theresa and about the stranger than fictional world of the tentacular Habsburgs in the latter half of the 18th century.

Antonia Fraser is the best-selling author of The Six Wives of Henry VIII, Mary Queen of Scots and Cromwell: Our Chief of Men. She has written two highly praised books focusing on women in history: The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England and The Warrior Queens: Boadicea's Chariot. Antonia Fraser is married to the playwright Harold Pinter.