"It can be a liability to like your subject too much when you start, as then the relationship only has one way to go!"

Historian Ophelia Field on the Duchess of Marlborough, the Kit-Cat Club and being a biographer.

Ophelia Field is the author of the critically acclaimed life of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, The Favourite, and the group biography The Kit-Cat Club: Friends who Imagined a Nation – named as one of the FT History Books of the Year. She is Director of the MA/PhD Biography Programme at the University of Buckingham. At HistFest 2024, Ophelia was a panellist on How to Survive a Tudor and Stuart Court.