Julia Baird is a journalist, broadcaster and author based in Sydney, Australia. She is a columnist for the International New York Times and host of The Drum on ABC (Australia). Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, the New York Times, Philadelphia Inquirer, Guardian, Washington Post, Sydney Morning Herald, Monthly and Harper's Bazaar. She has a PhD in history from the University of Sydney. In 2005, Baird was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard University.
Vividly written . . . it captures its subject with verve
*Sunday Times*
A stunning achievement . . .Neither sanitized nor mythologizing,
Victoria: The Queen is a remarkably lucid, endlessly engaging
account of Queen Victoria's life and rule
*Amanda Foreman*
In Baird's deft portrayal, Victoria lives, breathes, and struts
before us in all her complexity...On a geopolitical level, Baird's
sweeping historical portrait also illuminates just how
interconnected the European royal families were during this
time...Historical astuteness aside, the pages gallop along enhanced
by titillating morsels of info
*Esquire*
A vivid portrait of one of England's longest-reigning monarchs
*Entertainment Weekly*
Julia Baird's exquisitely wrought and meticulously researched
biography, brushes the dusty myth off this extraordinary monarch.
Right out of the gate, the book thrums with authority as Baird
builds her portrayal of Victoria. Overturning stereotypes, she rips
this queen down to the studs and creates her anew...Baird writes in
the round. She constructs a dynamic historical figure, then spins
out a spherical world of elegant reference, anchoring the narrative
in specific detail and pinning down complex swaths of history that,
in less capable hands, would simply blow away
*New York Times*
"Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without
theory." So said Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli. He would have
loved this big, blowsy bio of his sovereign. Queen Victoria was a
lusty wife, a doting mother and "a clever and forceful" politician.
Baird excavates Victoria the woman from beneath the ice-sheets of
past and present myth.
*Sunday Express*
Victoria was young enough when she assumed the throne to consult
with her prime minister about her eyebrows (were they too thin?),
confident enough when she married to excise the word 'obey' from
her vows. Julia Baird vividly captures her in every light, at once
bold and sentimental, stubborn and deferential. Victoria: The Queen
is a crisp, sparkling account of the extraordinary woman whose
reign was as long as her legacy is vast
*Stacy Schiff*
[Baird's] portrayal of the ways in which Albert's brilliance and
industry reinforced Victoria's inferiority complex . . . and the
subsequent revelation of her ability to rule alone after his death,
is one of the undoubted strengths of Baird's work
*Times Literary Supplement*
Fascinating
*Vogue*
Baird's extensive research has enabled her to complete an
accessible and engrossing book which easily lives up to its claim
to be an "intimate biography"
*Herald*
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