Rising Star: Lucy Moore, Historian

Brought up in Britain and the US, educated at Edinburgh University, historian Lucy Moore (born in 1970) first honed her narrative skills on the low-life underside of 18th-century society in books such as 'The Thieves' Opera' and 'Con Men and Cutpurses'. Chosen as one of the 'Independent on Sunday''s Top 20 young British authors in 2001, she won wide acclaim with two books about groups of women. 'Maharanis' followed the mixed fortunes of a quartet of Indian princesses and their families, while 'Liberty' told the stories of six women caught up in the French Revolution as it turned away from its ideals of gender equality. Published next month, her new book 'Anything Goes' is an especially well-timed history of the Roaring Twenties as the decade motored from hedonistic, high-spending boom to the bust of the Great Crash in 1929.