Kate Williams - historian and author

Kate Williams is a historian, author, and broadcaster. She is the author of ten historical books, including The Royal Palaces: Secrets and Scandals and Rival Queens: The Betrayal of Mary Queen of Scots.

Williams specialises in history and royalty and she is CNN's royal historian. She has loved history ever since she tried to build a time machine, aged 7.

She studied her undergraduate and DPhil at The University of Oxford and in her spare time she has a secret passion for the tube and trying not to kill pot plants.

If she could travel back in time, she would tell Anne Boleyn to make a run for it to France and smuggle her out of Henry VIII's palace in a washing bundle.

In 2019, Williams chaired the Women's Prize for Fiction.

Coverage: History

MOST RECENT ARTICLES FROM KATE WILLIAMS

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Napoleon and Josephine's volcanic romance was so overtly sexual - including her famous 'zigzag' technique - that it transfixed Europe. Now Ridley Scott's new film starring Joaquin Phoenix reveals the French emperor's devastation when they divorced

22/11/23 10:15

Theirs was the love affair of the century - the 18th century. She, the spoilt daughter of a slave-owner, raised on a Caribbean plantation, who ate so much sugar that her teeth turned a grizzled black. He, the hollow-cheeked military upstart with an astonishing capacity for rudeness trumped only by his unwavering arrogance. Their relationship was so tempestuous, dramatic and overtly sexual that it transfixed and alarmed French high society in equal measure, while the couple's exploits - in the boudoir and on the battlefield - have become the stuff of legend. Her full name was Marie-Josephe-Rose de Tascher de La Pagerie. But she is remembered simply as Josephine, wife of Napoleon Bonaparte and Empress of France. Yesterday saw the release of Ridley Scott's epic blockbuster biopic tracing the life of Napoleon (Joaquin Phoenix) and his marriage to Josephine ( Vanessa Kirby , best-known for her brilliant portrayal of Princess Margaret in The Crown)....read