SarahBradford : Historian & Biographer – Queen Elizabeth – Diana – George VI – America’s Queen – Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Author

sarah bradford

Educated at St. Mary’s Convent, Shaftesbury Dorset, where she won a State Scholarship and at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, where she won a College Scholarship in History, Sarah Bradford is an historian and biographer who has travelled extensively, living in the West Indies, Portugal and Italy. She speaks four languages which have been invaluable in her research for her various books, particularly The Englishman’s Wine, the Story of Port (the first book on the subject written by a woman), Portugal and Madeira. She worked in the Manuscript Department of Christie’s London, travelling for the Department and valuing manuscripts from the fifteenth to twentieth centuries, an experience which enabled her to write Cesare Borgia (used by the BBC as the source of their series ‘The Borgias’, for which she wrote the novelisation of the scripts) and, most recently, Lucrezia Borgia. 

Her other biographies include Disraeli, named Book of the Year by the New York Times, Princess Grace, written with the cooperation of Prince Rainier and the Kelly family, George VI (published in the United States as The Reluctant King) which his daughter, the Queen, is said to keep on her desk, Splendours and Miseries, The Life of Sacheverell Sitwell, written at the request of the writer’s family who made the archives available to her for the first time, two international bestsellers, Elizabeth, a Biography of Her Majesty the Queen, and America’s Queen, The Life of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.

She frequently appears on television as an authority on her biographical subjects and as a commentator for notable royal events such as the funerals of Diana, Princess of Wales and Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and the Royal Jubilee in 2002. She lives in London and is married to the 8th Viscount Bangor.