Fellow historical fiction fiends: you will be painfully aware that there"s some shocking stuff out there. Bad writing that screws with the facts and gives readers some very worrying ideas about historical figures. So thank goodness for Sarah Dunant.

Blood and Beauty is Dunant"s tenth novel, and her fourth to be set in Renaissance Italy. In her first three she steered clear of "famous" figures and gave us stories of strong, ordinary women, so an epic novel about the notorious Borgia family is something of a departure. Given her exhaustive research for her other novels, though (she spends a year in the British Library researching each book; for her third she lived in a Milanese convent for a week), she is pretty well-qualified for the undertaking.

Blood and Beauty spans the period from 1492 to 1502, focusing on Rodrigo Borgia, who is elected as Pope Alexander VI as the novel opens, and his children Cesare and Lucrezia.

The plot follows the facts: over the next decade four of the Pope"s children get married, most of them have children of their own, Cesare (who during the 1490s became the only man to become a Cardinal and then become a civilian again) leads an army of Frenchmen to attack Naples, and there"s a good sprinkling of constant power-play, a few massacres, syphilis and some casual sex (His Holiness was very fond of women). Reading that, you"d be forgiven for thinking this is a high-octane thriller, and in some chapters it almost is, but it"s also a masterly ensemble piece. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Blood and Beauty (Sarah Dunant)