Ruth Brandon writes both fiction and non-fiction. Her non-fiction titles include biographies - 'The Life and Many Deaths of Harry Houdini', 'Being Divine: A biography of Sarah Bernhardt', 'Singer and the Sewing Machine' - and group biographies: 'Surreal Lives', 'The Dollar Princesses', 'The New Women and the Old Men', and her book about governesses, 'Other People's Daughters'. She explores questions such as the gap between how we see ourselves and how the world sees us, the secret of charisma, and above all why people act and think as they do at a particular moment. In her latest book, 'Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubinstein, L'Oreal and the Blemished History of Looking Good', she looks at the beauty business, and the power it has over us, through the lives of Helena Rubinstein and Eugene Schueller, the founder of L'Oréal.

Her fiction includes both 'literary' novels - 'Tickling the Dragon', 'The Uncertainty Principle' - and detective stories, the latest of which is Caravaggio's Angel.