This spring sees a fascination with what-ifs, pretenders and nearly men. Ann Wroe, who made such a stunning success of writing about Pontius Pilate three years ago, turns to another shadowy subject. Perkin: A Story of Deception (Cape, April) tells the story of Perkin Warbeck, the man who tried to pass himself off as one of the princes in the tower. Lady Jane Grey, always good for a melancholic reprise, gets a new lease on her short life from Alison Plowden (Sutton, May). Sarah Gristwood, meanwhile, brings to light the virtually unknown story of Arbella: The Lost Queen (Bantam, February), a niece of Mary Queen of Scots with at least as good a claim to the English throne as her cousin James I.
As far as publishing opportunities are concerned, Tudors and Stuarts continue to be the new Victorians. Alison Weir, one of our most prolific but critically unnoticed historical writers, turns her attention to Mary Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley (Cape, May). David Starkey produces Elizabeth I: The Woman, the Queen and her Empire (Chatto, May). The only surprise is that he hasn't written this book before. Finally in May comes Elizabeth and Mary: Cousins, Rivals, Queens (HarperCollins) from Jane Dunn.
Look out, too, for a long-needed biography of Julia Margaret Cameron by Joy Melville (Sutton, February). One of the first celebrity photographers, Cameron's stagily contrived images are a reminder that, right from its inception, photography did as much to create reality as it did to record it.
Memoir continues to figure strongly this spring, to the point where it no longer makes sense to think of it as anything other than a fully established and continuing genre, like biography or fiction. In March Frederic Raphael offers Spoilt Boy (Orion), a recollection of his doubtless glittering childhood, while David Henry Sterry's Chicken (Canongate, April) explains how he became a Hollywood teen gigolo in the 1970s.
An Accidental Woman (Simon & Schuster, March) by Barbara Delinsky should be interesting. As the title suggests, memoirists are continuing to puzzle out how their thrown-together lives can be mapped on to an inherited literary model that assumes that they are the driving and designing force of their own existence.
Place and time are at the heart of the memoir genre, and Bryan Magee's Clouds of Glory: A Childhood in Hoxton (Cape, June) is itself a reminder that social topography can change dramatically within a single generation.
There is also some material which falls between stools. Hilary Mantel's Giving up the Ghost (Fourth Estate, July) is an "autobiography in fiction and non-fiction", while Margaret Forster's Diary of an Ordinary Woman (Chatto, March) is a fictional memoir.
· Kathryn Hughes is writing a biography of Mrs Beeton.
