JULIE PEAKMAN is a historian and writer, an Honorary Fellow of Birkbeck College, London University and former Honorary Fellow of Wellcome History of the History of Medicine. Her next book is for Atlantic Publishers, Carnal Knowledge, A World History of Sex. Her previous books include Lascivious Bodies. A Sexual History of the Eighteenth Century (Atlantic 2004), Mighty Lewd Books. The Development of Pornography in Eighteenth-Century England (Palgrave 2003). She is also the biographer of Emma Hamilton (Haus, 2005); and editor of Whore Biographies 1700-1825 (Pickering and Chatto, 2007, 8 vols), and A History of the Culture of Sexuality (Berg, due 2009). She is a frequent contributor to television history documentaries, international conferences and journals.