SOURCE: "Not Quite Your Usual Historian," in Time, Vol. 135, No. 3, January 15, 1990, pp. 66, 68.

In the following essay Angelo presents details of Fraser's life and records comments on Fraser's crime fiction and historical work.

She is the kind of woman Maureen O'Hara used to play in big-budget costume movies: Lady Antonia Fraser, beautiful, hot-blooded, titled daughter of a noble line, turreted castles in her background and the whiff of scandal in her past. But the portrait of a romance-novel heroine slips out of focus with a closer look, for that same Lady Antonia is an internationally established historian, the author of best-selling biographies and a social activist. She is mother of six, protective wife of renowned playwright Harold Pinter, and also dashes off detective stories, wafts along the British TV celeb circuit, and displays an admirable tennis serve.

But forget Goody Two-Shoes. This paragon wades into controversy with brio. She...