SARAH BRADFORD

After reaching Philadelphia, Tubman began thinking of her family. "I was a stranger in a strange land," she said later. "My father, my mother, my brothers, and sisters, and friends were in Maryland. But I was free, and they should be free." For 11 years Tubman returned again and again to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rescuing some 70 slaves in 13 expeditions, including her three other brothers, Henry, Ben, and Robert, their wives and some of their children.

From Sarah Bradford, the best-selling author of George VI, Elizabeth and Diana, the definitive biography of Queen Elizabeth II, now celebrating the Platinum Jubilee -- her 70th year on the throneElizabeth II has lived through the Abdication, the Blitz and World War Two, the sex and spy scandals of the swinging sixties, the Cold War and the nuclear threat, the fall of the Berlin Wall, and a global pandemic. She has known 14 US Presidents including JFK, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump, and other world leaders like President Mandela and Pope John XXII. Her Prime Ministers have ranged from Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher to Boris Johnson.Her own family experiences, a mixture of happiness and crisis, weddings and divorces, and, in the case of Diana, violent death, have been lived in the glare of tabloid headlines. More than 2 billion people watched the wedding of her grandson Prince William to Catherine Middleton in 2010 shortly before she made the first State Visit to Ireland by a British monarch for 100 years. Our world has changed more in her lifetime than in any of her predecessors'': the Queen has remained a calm presence at the centre, earning the respect of monarchists and republicans. How has she done it?

From Sarah Bradford, the best-selling author of George VI, Elizabeth and Diana, the definitive biography of Queen Elizabeth II, to tie in with the Diamond Jubilee. Elizabeth II has lived through the Abdication, the Blitz and World War Two, the sex and spy scandals of the swinging sixties, the Cold War and the nuclear threat and the Fall of the Berlin Wall. She has known 11 US Presidents including JFK and Ronald Reagan, and other world leaders like President Mandela and Pope John XXII. Her Prime Ministers have ranged from Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher to David Cameron, the last only ten years older than her grandson. Her own family experiences, a mixture of happiness and crisis, weddings and divorces, and, in the case of Diana, violent death, have been lived in the glare of tabloid headlines. More than 2 billion people watched the wedding of her grandson Prince William to Catherine Middleton in 2010 shortly before she made the first State Visit to Ireland by a British monarch for 100 years. Our world has changed more in her lifetime than in any of her predecessors': the Queen has remained a calm presence at the centre, earning the respect of monarchists and republicans. How has she done it? 'Bradford has a real grasp of history and the ability to make it spark into new life' Sunday Telegraph 'Bradford's forte, ever since she was a history-mad girl, is thinking herself into other lives' Daily Telegraph Sarah Bradford is a historian and biographer. Her books include Cesare Borgia (1976), Disraeli (1982), winner of the New York Times Book of the Year, Princess Grace (1984), Sacherevell Sitwell (1993), Elizabeth: A Biography of Her Majesty the Queen (1996), America's Queen: The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis (2000), Lucrezia Borgia (2005) and Diana (2007). She frequently appears on television as an authority on her biographical subjects and as a commentator on notable royal events. She is currently working on a full scale biography of Queen Victoria. She lives in London.

Almost five centuries have passed since Cesare Borgia''s death, yet his reputation still casts a sinister shadow. He stands accused of treachery, cruelty, rape, incest and, especially, murder - assassination by poison, the deadly white powder concealed in the jewelled ring, or by the midnight band of bravos lurking in the alleys of Renaissance Rome. Yet the real Cesare Borgia was a fascinating figure in the mould of the great Shakespearean hero. During the brief space of time in which he occupied the stage he shocked and stunned his contemporaries by the loftiness of his ambitions, the boldness and daring of their execution. His rise to fame was meteoric. Born the illegitimate son of a Spanish Cardinal who became Pope Alexander VI, he was, by his 27th year, the most hated, feared and envied man of his day, flattered and courted by the rulers of France, Spain and the Empire, admired by Machiavelli who immortalised him in The Prince. At 31 he was dead, having failed to achieve his ambition of a great Italian State. In Sarah Bradford''s brilliant biography, Cesare''s life and struggles assume the proportion of Greek tragedy.

Glamour. Duty. Tragedy: The Woman Behind the Princess. Sarah Bradford delivers an authoritative and explosive study of the greatest icon of the twentieth century: Diana. After more than a decade interviewing those closest to the Princess and her select circle, Sarah Bradford exposes the real Diana: the blighted childhood, the old-fashioned courtship which saw her capture the Prince of Wales, the damage caused by the spectre of Camilla Parker Bowles, through to the collapse of the royal marriage and Diana's final and complicated year as single woman. Diana paints an honest portrait of a woman riddled with contradictions and whose vulnerability and unique empathy with the suffering made her one of the most extraordinary figures of the modern age.

Apart from the rest of the children, on the top rail of a fence, holding tight on to the tall gate post, sat a little girl of perhaps thirteen years of age; darker than any of the others, and with a more decided woolliness in the hair; a pure unmitigated African. She was not so entirely in a state of nature as the rollers in the dust beneath her; but her only garment was a short woolen skirt, which was tied around her waist, and reached about to her knees. She seemed a dazed and stupid child, and as her head hung upon her breast, she looked up with dull blood-shot eyes towards her young brothers and sisters, without seeming to see them. Bye and bye the eyes closed, and still clinging to the post, she slept. The other children looked up and said to each other, "Look at Hatt, shes done gone off agin!" Tired of their present play ground they trooped off in another direction, but the girl slept on heavily, never losing her hold on the post, or her seat on her perch. Behold here, in the stupid little negro girl, the future deliverer of hundreds of her people; the spy and scout of the Union armies; the devoted hospital nurse; the protector of hunted fugitives; the eloquent speaker in public meetings; the cunning eluder of pursuing man-hunters; the heaven guided pioneer through dangers seen and unseen; in short, as she has well been called, "The Moses of her People."

Hija ilegítima de uno de los papas más célebres del Renacimiento, Alejandro VI, Lucrecia ha representado el papel arquetípico de la mujer malvada. Se la ha acusado de asesinato por envenenamiento y de mantener relaciones incestuosas con su padre y con su hermano, el celebre Cesar Borgia. En este estremecedor y sorprendente retrato, Sarah Bradford nos descubre a la mujer que se esconde tras del mito: una superviviente que logro forjarse su propio destino en un mundo peligroso, en un tiempo de guerras y conspiraciones fatricidas. A traves de documentos de la epoca, que incluyen cientos de cartas de la propia Lucrecia, Bradford realiza un retrato convincente de una mujer extraordinaria.