Awards
Costa Biography Award
2009 Shortlist
Dancing to the Precipice by Caroline Moorehead
Publisher: Chatto & Windus
Lucie de la Tour du Pin was the Pepys of her generation. Born Lucie Dillon to a half-French mother and an Anglo-Irish father, her world was Versailles and the court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Repeatedly in the right place at the right time, Lucie saw the Battle of Waterloo, the fall of Napoleon and the return of Louis XVIII, and the Restoration. Her friends included Wellington, Lafayette, Alexander Hamilton, Talleyrand and Madame de Stael. She died, aged 83, in Pisa. Mixing politics and court intrigue, social observation and everyday details about food, work, illness, children, manners and clothes, Moorehead paints a vivid and memorable portrait of an era - lasting three-quarters of a century - that saw the fortunes of France, as well as those of Lucie herself, rise and fall and rise again.
Caroline Moorehead is the biographer of Bertrand Russell, Freya Stark, Iris Origo and Martha Gellhorn. Well known for her work in human rights, she has published a history of the Red Cross and a book about refugees, Human Cargo. She lives in London and Italy. Fluent in French and Italian, her research for this book uncovered letters, documents and portraits, many never previously examined.
Judges: "An exemplary biography of an extraordinary woman."
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