MEET THE Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes of the 21st century. Or should that be the new Anais Nin and Henry Miller? Either way, Leonie Frieda and Andrew Roberts are a literary couple who flourish on celebrity and defying orthodoxy.
She's the former model and rock music mogul who credits writing with helping her overcome cocaine addiction and proving she could mother her two children. He's the party boy who can still rise at 4am to work on books he describes as part of a movement devoted to resolving the betrayal of the world's children.
Frieda and Roberts discuss their struggles in columns and reviews for Britain's Daily Telegraph. Tatler magazine devotes pages to their glamorous lives. Royalty queues for their parties. David Tang insists on a private dinner with them at the China Club during their week of speaking engagements in Hong Kong.
When did literature start making stars out of people in their 40s who come from privileged backgrounds and whose politics are rigidly conservative? When non-fiction took over from the novel in the public imagination.
Frieda and Roberts didn't make biography and history sexy, but they do confirm that non-fiction has for years offered readers more interesting stories. Amid all the talk that a dumber public has ditched literature for electronic fantasies, crates of narrative non-fiction have been selling.
They write a more traditional form of history - ignoring the quirky characters in popular books by the likes of Simon Winchester and the postmodernist bent of today's historians. Roberts, 41, writes about history's alpha males - Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership and Napoleon and Wellington. Frieda's first book, Catherine de Medici: A Biography, about the 16th-century queen of France, has brought her acclaim and good sales this year.
