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By day, Lucy Worsley is Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, which looks after The Tower of London, Hampton Court, and Kensington Palace inter al.

By night, she is a TV presenter and writer, most recently author of Courtiers: The Secret History of Kensington Palace. You can listen to my interview with her by clicking here.

Here are her summer reading choices:

I have felt like a junkie in need of a fix ever since I reluctantly finished the last page of The Secret History by Donna Tartt for the first time, fifteen years ago, so I was very excited to learn that Curtis Sittenfeld had written a ‘similar’ book about boarding school life.

I’m a little slow on the uptake here as it was published in 2005, but after reading about her imagined secret life of Laura Bush in American Wife this year I fell in love with Ms. Sittenfeld, and looked up her back catalogue.

Prep is a mind-blowingly clever, funny and brilliant book. Unfortunately it made me a terrible, grouchy, uninterested holiday companion. Luckily I can blame my new favourite author rather than myself.