The biographer of Queen Elizabeth II here tackles the life of Lucrezia Borgia, one of the most celebrated and also vilified women of 16th-century Italy. "Historians who have attempted to rescue Lucrezia Borgia from her legend as a poisoner who slept with both her father, Pope Alexander VI, and her brother, Cesare Borgia, have mostly described her as a pawn," notes The New Yorker. "Bradford sees Lucrezia neither as a helpless victim nor a femme fatale but as a resourceful individual ... the equal in political skill, if not in brutality, of her notorious male relatives."