Even as she approaches her 91st birthday, with her mobility impaired and her hearing no longer perfect, Antonia Fraser, acclaimed historian and author, is contemplating what to write next. This may come as a surprise to readers of her latest book, a biography of one of Lord Byron’s most famous lovers, the sexually adventurous, self- glamourising and reputedly deranged Caroline Lamb, who is said to have shackled the legendary poet with the label ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’.

In its opening pages, Fraser writes that her book can ‘be regarded as the culmination of an exciting and fulfilling life spent studying History.’

*But in the flesh she insists this is no valediction. Seated on an immaculate cream sofa in the living room of her Holland Park home—a house she shared for over three decades with her second husband Harold Pinter, the Nobel- prize winning playwright, who died in 2008—Fraser says she “chose the word with great care because you can “culminate”’, there is a hesitation, she peers at me through blue-rimmed glasses, smiles beguilingly, then continues; “it doesn’t mean you stop.”

So will there be another book after Caroline Lamb? “I don’t know”, she replies playfully. “I think 90 is quite a nice place to stop.”

Her reluctance to call time on a writing career that stretches back almost seven decades is hardly surprising. Her firstbook, King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, part of a historical series for children, was published in 1954 when she was just 22. Fame descended fifteen years later after the publication of Mary Queen of Scots, a dazzling biography which propelled Fraser into the front ranks of a new generation of talented historians.

But she had no intention, she once quipped, of being ‘pinioned’ as a biographer of ‘romantic queens’ and so she followed her 1969 bestseller with a book on Oliver Cromwell, and continued in that vein for several years, churning out biographies on James VI & I and Charles II.

A change of gear came in 1984 when she won the coveted Wolfson History Prize for The Weaker Vessel, a groundbreaking, panoramic study of women’s lives in 17th century England. By the turn of the century, she was well on her way to becoming a literary icon with dozens of works to her name, including an examination of Henry VIII and his six wives, a narrative history of the Gunpowder Plot, and a string of crime novels.

Three years before her 2001 biography of Marie Antoinette cemented her status as one of the most read historians in the world — the book formed the basis for Sofia Coppola’s 2006 biopic of the doomed queen — the celebrated biographer Michael Holroyd described Fraser as one of the “aristocrats of our profession”, capable of challenging our “understanding of the present” and affecting “our vision of the future”.

Yet Fraser’s identity has never been solely about her literary achievements. Glamour, beauty and her aristocratic Anglo-Irish lineage have always helped to fix her in the limelight; no more so than in the 70s, when she left her Tory MP husband Hugh Fraser, father of her six children, for Pinter, a long-established playwright, ’the spiritual son’, critics agreed, of Samuel Beckett — but also a left-leaning Jew from the East End.

The press had a field day. In her memoir of their life together, Must You Go, Fraser claimed the tabloid fascination with their ‘different backgrounds’ was ‘more for headlines than accuracy’. Pinter had been a wealthy man since the success of The Caretaker in 1960, while her father, Frank Pakenham, who converted to Catholicism in 1940, only succeeded to the Earldom of Longford when Fraser was in her late twenties. ‘My childhood’, she wrote, ‘was spent in a modest North Oxford house, my father, with no private income, teaching at the University.’

This rather underplays the glittering intellectual company her family kept. As mentioned in her second memoir, My History, their wide circle of friends included Evelyn Waugh, Isaiah Berlin, John Betjeman, A.J.P Taylor, and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Aristocratic connections may not have produced a life of luxury, but her background meant she moved with ease among the elite. (Pakenham’s grandmother was the formidable Tory hostess, Margaret Countess ofJersey; further back the family line encompasses the Duke of Wellington, Sir Robert Peel and Charles II’s mistress, Barbara Villiers.)

In her younger years, with her trademark blond hair, wide mouth, and kohl-rimmed eyes, Fraser’s looks were compared to those of Julie Christie’s, particularly after the film star played Lara in Dr Zhivago.

Age has brought a more stately appearance but it is not hard to see why she was a well-known beauty. Clad in a cream and pink floral jacket, a slash of scarlet on her lips, she still radiates glamour.

Life now though is more confined. The steps that lead up to the imposing front door of her Grade II listed home have a stair lift attached to them. Another one rises up to the first floor.

When the housekeeper ushers me into the spacious, sun-splashed living room, with french doors leading out onto aterrace and a distantly glimpsed garden, Fraser does not turn her head, but remains absorbed in a Tracey Borman book on the Tudor era.

Encroaching deafness has increased her dependence on others. She does not jump when the housekeeper calls her name but smiles sweetly. Coffee is ordered and arrives served on a silver salver.

Amid a discussion about why she chose to remain outside the academy — she never pursued a PhD, although she holds a degree from Oxford — one of her two cats, King Ferdinand, strides imperiously onto the laptop on my knee. Fraser gives him a gentle shove. ‘Do stop being a bore Ferdy’, she says in her cut-glass accent.

There is a standoff. He refuses to join Queen Bella (named after Isabella I of Castile) on the other side of the room,and for a moment appears intent on causing a commotion; then settles down, and for the rest of the interview purrs loudly beside me.

Like the late Barbara Tuchman, author of The Guns of August, Fraser has sustained her fair share of attacks from academic historians over the years but has never returned fire. On one occasion, charged with a lack of analytical depth, Tuchman retorted that scholars often struggle to tell a good story.

Narrative history needs few defenders these days, while the image of the academic historian in dusty tweeds has long since vanished. It was a different story in the sixties, when Fraser says she benefited from a growing interest in the subject that arose out of reforms introduced to the British school system during the Second World War. ‘People suddenly got very well educated and they wanted to read history….that is readable, you know, as opposed to doing history at Oxford.’

Fraser’s family overflows with writers. In fact, the Longford clan could fill a library. In the thirties, her father published Peace by Ordeal, still the definitive account of the 1921 Anglo Irish Treaty negotiations, and sometime later co-authored a biography on Éamon de Valera. Her mother, the historian Elizabeth Longford, produced acclaimed biographies on Queen Victoria and the Duke of Wellington, while brother Thomas, the current Earl of Longford, has written on the Boer War. Two sisters are writers, as are a number of her children.

One observer noted the family ‘have written more books and filled more shelves than the Churchills and the Mitfords combined’.

Yet Fraser insists that she saw writing as her own activity growing up. ‘It was mine’ she says, holding her hands up toher chest in a gesture of possession. “I didn’t think of my father as a writer. I thought he was a great man with great ideas…but I didn’t think of him as a writer’. Her mother, she points out, took up the pen later in life, when Fraser was in her thirties.

Although her father was a don, and Fraser was ‘brought up’, as she puts it, ‘in academe’, politics was the lifeblood ofthe house. Her mother campaigned for the Labour Party, converting her husband to the cause so that he too joined the fray, accepting roles in the Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson administrations.

Her father, who persuaded his unitarian wife to adopt Catholicism, died in 2001 at the age of 95. As the historian Dominic Sandbrook writes, he had gained a reputation by then as ‘a sentimental idealist and dogged advocate of unpopular causes’ thanks to a high-profile crusade against pornography, as well as campaigns on prison reform and, later, the rehabilitation of child-killer Myra Hindley.

Fraser embraced Catholicism at the age of 14, and once said it was at that point she resolved ‘to do whatever I wanted to do, whatever that happened to be.’

Does she see herself as a courageous person? She shakes her head. ‘I’m not a courageous woman but I’m a woman who wishes she was a courageous woman’; and agrees that perhaps it is this characteristic above all others that draws her to certain historical personalities. ‘It’s complicated’, she shrugs.

Yet the battle against oppression, waged by the individual or a section of society, is a recurring theme in Fraser’s work. Always a surefooted and engaging guide, she has shown readers how Mary Queen of Scots, bound for execution, did not die a hapless victim, ‘but managed to convert a life story which had hitherto shown all the elements of a Greek tragedy into something which ended instead in the classic Christian manner of martyrdom and triumph through death.’

A search for freedom and liberty underpins her most recent books too, from Perilous Question, a fast-paced account of the parliamentary brinkmanship over the Great Reform Bill of 1832, to The King and the Catholics, a narrative of the fight for Catholic Emancipation. She then turned to Caroline Norton, granddaughter of the Irish playwright, Richard Sheridan, who lost access to her children after her violent, manipulative husband, George Norton, accused her of an affair with Lord Melbourne.

In The Case of The Married Woman, Fraser focuses on a sensational trial that took place in London in 1836. Norton’s husband had sued Melbourne for adultery — the prime minister, we learn, had a predilection for flagellation in consensual sex — but failed to prove his case.

Despite this, Norton continued to deprive his wife of access to her three sons. After the trial, Caroline Norton, now a social outcast, shunned by Melbourne and her friends, lobbied parliament to change the laws surrounding custody and divorce. She prevailed, and her efforts helped secure rights which women take for granted today.

The beautiful and wildly unconventional Lady Caroline Lamb, — ‘Caro…the little volcano’ as Byron liked to call her — is the latest, and potentially the last, historical figure to benefit from Fraser’s humanising treatment.

Dismissed during and after her life as a mad woman, Byron’s maligned lover, wife of the future Lord Melbourne, never recovered from the effects of her affair with the libertine poet.

She was a natural exhibitionist, and liked to disguise herself as a male — a desire, Fraser cautions, not for what we would recognise today as gender fluidity, but a bid for freedom and independence. Ill-matched psychologically to her husband, William Lamb, she craved the attention and passion lavished upon her by Byron. But the affair did not last long. Signs of fatigue were evident two months in, and when he dumped her soon afterwards, and treated her with scorn, she refused to take it lying down.

Her behaviour became more and more outlandish: on one occasion she cut herself in public. For all her theatrics — Fraser leaves open the question of whether Lamb suffered from a bi-polar disorder — Caro was clearly a ‘literary, intelligent’ woman, so took her revenge on Byron by writing a novel which gave a thinly disguised version of their affair.

According to the conventions of the licentious Whig world, Lamb was supposed to keep her mouth shut and bed another lover.

Instead, she ‘broke the rules’, for like many of Fraser’s subjects, she was a ‘free spirit’.

It is easy to draw the same conclusion about the author herself. Fraser confesses in My History to always wanting to know a ‘genius’. When she ran off with Pinter, there was surprise in some quarters, as she relates in Must You Go, at why there needed to be a divorce. Why couldn’t she and Pinter ‘just have an affair like everyone else?’

When reminded of that torrid time — the relationship provoked a reaction which is unimaginable today — she explains that it is “very difficult even for my grandchildren to understand why their parents were shocked because people at school were shocked.’

Her first love though was ‘writing’ — and ‘reading…My mother taught me to read at the age of three and a half’. So can she really bear to turn her back on what evidently comes as natural to her as breathing? She pauses for a moment, then with teasing courtesy says: “I thought about writing a short book about Jane Grey, but I think I have thought aboutit and have sort of written it in my thoughts.” Her legions of fans worldwide will be hoping she changes her mind, and one day, brings her considerable powers to bear upon the Tudor era’s “Nine Day Queen”.

Antonia Fraser is a writer and the author of over 30 books, including Marie Antoinette, Cromwell and her latest, Lady Caroline Lamb: A Free Spirit.

Gretchen Friemann is a journalist, writer and the author of The Treaty.