Berkoff is a titan of the stage and a might with a pen. He’s best known for playing the darkest of characters but in reality he’s charm personified. Berkoff beat Julie Burchill in a libel case in 1996 and finds it “flattering” to play evil characters. He lives on the…
This talented Oxford educated author is a former credit derivatives trader who is now regular on BBC2’s The Review Show. This Bleeding City, his first novel, was based on his own working experiences and analyses how the financial crash could be seen as “our subconscious revenge, our way of bringing…
This “Boswell of the bluebloods” was a writer whose tips came from unnamed sources and “waiter[s] serving me risotto at a dinner party.” Though Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. described him a “gossip columnist” and he had to pay undisclosed damages to a Californian Congressman named Gary Condit in 2005, his…
The sister of The Duchess of Cambridge was paid a £400,000 advance by Penguin for her first book, Celebrate. A graduate of the University of Edinburgh, Middleton’s view of her changed circumstances is simple: “It’s been a crazy few years since my sister’s wedding.” Whilst the chattering classes attack her…
Though best known for Swallows and Amazons, Ransome’s life in Russia was what makes him most fascinating. He was sued unsuccessfully by Lord Alfred Douglas over a biography of Oscar Wilde, played chess with Lenin and married Trotsky’s personal secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina. Accused by many of being a spy,…
Fluent in six languages, this Athenian was fashion editor of The Tatler and a columnist for The Times. Resident in London’s Knightsbridge, Matheopoulos has written a biography of King Juan Carlos of Spain and wrote Fashion Designers at the Opera in 2011. Her parties are known for being full of…
Best known for her chilling novel The Woman in White, this writer also did a stint on the BBC’s The Archers and runs a small publishing house named Long Barn Books. Married to the Shakespeare scholar Professor Stanley Wells, Hill lives in a farmhouse with 50 acres of woodland in…
Julian Fellowes (The Lord Fellowes of West Stafford DL, also known as Julian Kitchener-Fellowes)
English actor, novelist, film director and screenwriter. His career pottered along until he won an Oscar for Gosford Park in 2002. Subsequent success came with Downton Abbey in 2011 but his personal obsession with the Titanic disaster resulted in an iceberg of a flop with a 2012 ITV mini-series on…
