Lucy Hughes-Hallett gave a talk on her book, The Pike, Gabriele D’Annunzio, which has been one of BBC Radio 4’s book of the week.  It is a biography in which an appetite for sex and beautiful things is juxtaposed with warfare and deadly politics.

There is a delightful postscript to Lucy’s talk. Exactly a week afterwards, it was announced that Lucy was the winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction 2013 for her book, The Pike.   Shortly afterwards it also won the Costa Biography Award and the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize which celebrates the best in non-fiction writing.