Hugo Vickers is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and an acknowledged expert on the British Royal Family. He has written biographies of the Queen Mother, Cecil Beaton, Vivien Leigh, Princess Andrew of Greece and the Duchess of Windsor. His book The Kiss won the 1996 Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction. His recent bestsellers have included The Quest For Queen Mary and The Sphinx - the life of Gladys, the Duchess of Marlborough.
"A fascinating document, a window on to a lost world of glamour, grandeur and snobbery ... an elegy, sad and comical, to a passing era. -- Craig Brown * Mail on Sunday * A luxuriant trawl through the recovered past...extraordinary book -- John Walsh * Sunday Times * 'I got as caught up in these distant but strangely evocative events as Vickers did . . . delicious in its way, recreating a lost world' -- Ysenda Maxtone Graham * The Times * 'Scintillating diaries' * Daily Mail * 'A quite brilliant record of a fading social and artistic milieu . . . a world to which Vickers is an unrivalled cicerone' -- Matthew Sturgis * The Oldie * 'A ripping read . . . [Vickers] has gathered unique knowledge and feeling for former social manners and morals; the ability to summon the ""something in the air"" of a recent but virtually forgotten past. It is described succinctly and unsentimentally in this book' * The Catholic Herald * 'Illuminating and brilliantly scurrilous' -- Marcus Field * The Standard * 'Vickers' diaries bristle with injudicious indiscretion...it is no small compliment to say that the biographer is here the equal of his subject' -- Michael Arditti * The Spectator *"