Katie Hickman starts ahead of the game so far as I am concerned, since A Trip to the Light Fantastic with a Mexican Circus, published in 1993, is one of the most bizarrely enjoyable books about Mexico that I have ever read – and it is, after all, a country that lends itself to such. Daughters of Britannia: The Lives and Times of Diplomatic Wives concerns itself at first sight with a more staid subject, and the title is certainly stuffier. (It is also possibly confusing, since Joanna Trollope wrote a book on a not totally dissimilar theme in 1983: Britannia’s Daughters: A Study of Women in the British Empire.)

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