I had always wanted to write, but I often think that if I had found a job I
liked after leaving university it would have taken me much longer to come to
it. I read medieval history, pretty undistinguishedly, but when I was
thrashing around trying to think about what I wanted to do with my life
after these unsatisfactory jobs writing was the only thing I could think
of - and history seemed the obvious thing to write about, although I had no
inclination to pursue an academic career. At the time I was hugely inspired
and encouraged by Stella Tillyard's fantastic Aristocrats, a group biography
of the Lennox sisters, which showed me that it was possible to combine
scholarship and with a flowing narrative and a sense of intimacy with the
past and with one's subjects.

What drew you to the story of the Indian princesses?

My father and stepmother lived in Mumbai for several years during the 1990s,
just when I was writing my first book, and I spent quite a lot of time in
India during that period. I hadn't properly known until then that my
mother's family had long and extensive links with the Raj, so I was
fascinated to find about what their lives had been like. As I read about
the British in India I became more and more intrigued about how the Indians
had felt about the British being there. Parallel to that was a curiosity
about purdah and an interest in the exoticism of princely India. When I
finished my second book, I couldn't think what to write about next. One day
I went to the London library and quite by chance picked up Sunity Devi's
biography - a dusty volume from 1921 which hadn't been taken out for
decades. I had read Ayesha Jaipur's magical A Princess Remembers while I
was in India and when I saw that she was Sunity Devi's granddaughter I knew
I had found a narrative I could weave a book around. When I met Ayesha a
few weeks later, to ask her whether she would mind if I wrote about her and
her family, she said, 'My other grandmother's [Chimnabai of Baroda] much
more interesting - you should use her story too.'  And there I was.

The book is filled with wondeful details and interesting facts about the lives
of the maharanis.  How did you research the book?

I spent about four trips of about six weeks each in India over a period of
three years, visiting the places in the book and interviewing anyone who
would talk to me about the four women. I was very lucky that the family
welcomed me with such friendliness and warmth, and made my research a
complete pleasure. Having been used to working only in libraries for my
first two books (on eighteenth century figures) it was amazing to find
myself in Cooch Behar or Calcutta interviewing people over puris and chota
pegs of whiskey. For the historical background I went to libraries in Delhi
and Calcutta but the most useful place was the India Office library in the
British Library - incredible archives, because so many people who served in
India left their photographs, diaries and letters to the library, as well as
practically every book ever published about the British Empire in India.

Was it difficult to write?

The most difficult thing was weaving the two early stories of the two
families together - the Cooch Behars and Barodas, whose lives were so
different and, until Indira met Jit, pretty unconnected.  Deciding to open
the book with the Delhi Durbar of 1911 gave me my structure, but it was still hard to
jump back and forth between the two families running parallel to each
other - and with such confusing names! - and keep the narrative going.

The book is non-fiction but the narrative is very compelling. Did you
think about writing it as fiction at any point?

I thought the truth was better than anything I could have made up! Gita
Mehta wrote a wonderful book called Raj which is a fictionalised version of
this kind of thing at the same period, so I felt as if that had been done.
Also I was fascinated by the historical background, the drama of
independence unfolding behind the four women's lives, and I wanted to
approach it as an integral part of the book, not simply a colourful stage
setting for the characters.

What are you working on now?

I'm writing a book about six women during the French Revolution. Each one
of them is utterly transformed by the revolution. I hope through looking at
all of them together to show how women from different backgrounds and of
different political views experienced the revolution. It is the most
compelling period of history and I have spent the past eighteen months
completely obsessed by it. I'm also about to begin filming a series for Sky
on the History of Prostitution, to be shown, hopefully, next spring.

Could you recommend 2 books for readers' groups?

Continuing the imperial theme but from a broader perspective,
Linda Colley's Captives is an extraordinary look at empire from a completely
new angle - that of British people adrift in strange, as yet unconquered
worlds. It turns everything you might have thought about the inevitability
of the march of pink across the globe upside down.  Jan Morris's trilogy Pax
Brittanica is a more conventional but equally absorbing examination of the
British Empire filled with insight and humanity.  For fiction, I don't think
anything can come close to George's Eliot's Middlemarch or Jane Austen's
Pride and Prejudice.