Rival Queens

5 Oct | 2pm | £16, £13 conc.

Educated at Oxford and London, Professor Kate Williams combines an incisive grasp of historical research with a fine talent as a storyteller. Fascinated by powerful women, her biographies have featured Josephine Bonaparte, Emma Hamilton and Queen Victoria. At this year’s Festival, she’ll talk about Rival Queens, her in-depth assessment of the rivalry between Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I as well as her foray into historical fiction, with her three-part historical saga about the glamorous but doomed de Witt family.

Kate writes regularly for newspapers and magazines, including The Sunday Telegraph, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent, The Spectator, Time Out, BBC History magazine and History Today, as well as reviewing books for History Today, BBC History Magazine, The Financial Times and Mslexia. She is the social historian on BBC2‘s Restoration Home, the royal and historical expert for CNN and she appears at least three times a week on TV or radio discussing historical matters from subjects as wide as the sugar tax on the Great British Bake Off to constitutional change on Newsnight and the Today programme. She presented her own programme on the youth of Queen Victoria, which is regularly repeated on television, most recently in 2013. She has also covered all the major royal events for all the channels.