Sarah Dunant is an award-winning writer, historian, critic and broadcaster, and a regular contributor to BBC Radio 4’s ‘A Point of View’. She has published thirteen novels and lectures regularly around the world at literary festivals and conferences. Her previous Renaissance novels, including Blood and Beauty, The Birth of Venus and In the Name of the Family, are renowned for weaving cutting-edge historical scholarship into compelling fiction and have been bestsellers in Britain and America, translated into thirty languages. Her unique ability to make historical figures and periods accessible to modern readers has earned her critical acclaim, with The Times noting that ‘Dunant makes the art and philosophy of the period look new and dangerous again.’