Sarah Gristwood is the author of several previous books of fifteenth and sixteenth-century history, including Game of Queens: The Women Who Made Sixteenth-Century Europe, and Blood Sisters: the Women Behind the Wars of the Roses. Her Arbella: England's Lost Queen and Elizabeth and Leicester both featured on the bestseller lists, and Sarah has also written a number of books on twentieth-century figures from Winston Churchill to Elizabeth II.

A former film journalist contributing to the Guardian, The Times, and the Telegraph, she now broadcasts regularly for Sky News, CNN and the BBC on royal and historical affairs, besides contributing to a number of documentary series such as Royal House of Windsor and Secrets of the National Trust. A graduate of Oxford University, she is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the RSA, who has been shortlisted for both the Marsh Biography Award and the Ben Pimlott Prize for Political Writing.