I have written detective stories and two 'literary' novels: Tickling the Dragon, which was about the fatal attraction of science and the making of the atom bomb, and The Uncertainty Principle, which is about parallel worlds. But I am primarily a non-fiction writer. I'm interested in why people think and act in the way they do at the moment they do, and I like to use biography to look at particular topics through individual lives. This was what I did in my very first book, Singer and the Sewing Machine: A Capitalist Romance, which was about immigrant expectations, harsh reality and social climbing in nineteenth-century America. Since then I have used the same technique in The Dollar Princesses, about American heiresses and European aristocracy, The Spiritualists, which explores the beginnings of spiritualism and its (literally) mind-bending attractions, The New Women and the Old Men, about self-deception among the early socialists in turn-of-the-century London, Being Divine: A life of Sarah Bernhardt, and The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini, both of which explore the roots of star quality, and Surreal Lives, about the Dadaists and Surrealists. AutoMobile sounds rather different – but once again it’s not really about cars but rather, as its subtitle, How the Car Changed Life, implies, about how the car formed the world we live in, so that it’s about psychology, planning, politics, and the growth of big business as much as it is about cars.  And The People’s Chef, A Life in Seven Courses, about the Victorian chef Alexis Soyer, looks at aspects of Victorian life through its food.

In 2008, I am publishing two new books.  The first, out in March from Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and (in America, from Walker Books), is about governesses.  It’s called Other People’s Daughters, the Life and Times of the Governess (in America, Governess:  The Lives and Times of the Real Jane Eyres) and looks at what it was to be a governess through seven short lives, or groups of lives.  These lives are not only extraordinarily dramatic in themselves, they also show what the governess system said about women’s place in the nineteenth-century world – and how the governess came to define what had to be changed.

My second book this year is a new detective story, Caravaggio’s Angel.  Out in September fron Constable and Robinson, it’s about art history and French politics, and I hope it will be the first of a series featuring a new heroine, the independent and ambitous Reggie Lee.