This rich and bouncy biography of a driven woman - mad for fashion, mad on passion - makes Posh look like a novice

Sparkling like Emma's pawned diamonds ... Finally makes us understand why Nelson needed to be prised out of Emma's embrace to fight Napoleon...

It is the thoroughness of the research and attention to detail that make Kate Williams' new biography of Emma Hamilton so interesting. The iconic Emma has been continuously reimagined since her lover Nelson's death, but Williams offers a new portrait

Kate Williams has done a wonderful job recreating the life of the woman she wants us to relate to...This is an immensely colourful, readable portrait that revels in Emma's resilience and her ability to surmount what look to us now to be unimaginable odds

Gallops along like a gripping novel, with an utterly believable and sympathetic character at its heart

Reveals the woman behind the myths

Utterly absorbing ... tantalizing

A wonderful sparkling biography

In this pacey retelling of a classic love story, Kate Williams has created a sparkling life worthy of Emma herself. A new biography for a new generation

Popular history at its best

Every intricate detail is laid out, and Kate Williams' writing is so immediate, you feel all but transported...

From Soho tart to glamour model, diplomatic wife in Naples to the most famous extra-marital passion in UK history: Emma Hamilton's amazing tale is hardly unfamiliar. Williams tells it shrewdly and well, with access to recently discovered letters and a sharp contemporary spin. In her skilled hands, Lord Nelson's lover, for all her "charisma, intelligence and charm" falls foul both of ingrained misogyny and a fledgling culture that both gave her stardom and exacted a fearsome price.

Lively, sympathetic and meticulously researched

Williams account is both balanced and evocative...[Emma Hamilton's] ruthless but romantic pursuit of celebrity is so close to our own time that the story barely needs contemporary parallels

Divertingly and instructively illuminates a time and culture both far away and intriguingly like our own, and resurrects a woman whose mingled vulnerability and resilience - to say nothing of her glamour - still have the power to fascinate

The first self-made superstar, the first manipulative media celebrity, dazzling Europe with her style and beauty as muse to artists and mistress to Nelson ... Emma famously gets her comeuppance, and her headlong flight to romantic destruction is told with novelistic dash

Rigorous and relevant

Pries open the most astounding archives to uncover what our recent ancestors tried to hide