Marie Antoinette: The Journey, by Antonia Fraser. I was gripped! What I thought was amazing was how she managed to keep politics out of it, and just present the royal family as real, flawed people caught in the gears of history - neither guilty nor innocent, just confused, like most of us.

<Added>

now made into a film by Sofia Coppola, apparently.

A brilliant book, sadly rendered into a completely vacuous film!

Coppola's adaptation was easy on the eye, but it left me feeling as if I'd tried to stifle gnawing hunger with a pile of fairy cakes - unsatisfied and slightly queasy.

Her biography of Cromwell is outstanding.