Welcome to my website!

My forthcoming book, The Mysterious Lives of Moura Budberg, documents the life of an intriguing adventuress, a Red Mata Hari, a vagabond, lover to HG Wells, Maxim Gorky and the British Agent in Russia during the Revolution - Robert Bruce Lockhart. The latter was involved in a plot to assassinate Lenin.  She was under surveillance by MI5 for thirty years as a suspected Russian spy. Guy Burgess came to her parties. And she was Nick Clegg’s great-great-aunt.

The 1934 film “British Agent” staring Leslie Howard and Kay Francis, and very loosley based on Lockhart and Budberg at the time of the revolution, has been released on DVD

 Last update - 19 March 2013

‘Clara Collet, 1860 - 1948: An Educated Working Woman’ Reviews:  

Clara Collet, the subject of a sympathetic full length study by Deborah McDonald, looks uncannily like a character from one of Gissing’s own novels.

D.J. Taylor, The Times Literary Supplement

‘Miss Collet’, as she was usually known, has attracted the attention of few scholars. Deborah McDonald offers the first full-length biography of this neglected figure .

Professor June Purvis, Women’s and Gender History, Portsmouth University

In this fine biography of an early advocate of women’s rights, readers of the [Gissing]‘Journal’ will find a great deal of valuable information about Gissing.

Professor Jacob Korg

‘The Prince, His Tutor and the Ripper’ Reviews:

An impressive work of research into the lives of three men, rightly or wrongly, connected with the Whitechapel murders.

Wolf Vanderlinden,

What has been needed for quite some time is a book that dispassionately looked at the evidence that has formed the basis of the cases against [J.K. Stephen and Prince Eddy].  And that is exactly what Deborah McDonald has done - and she has done it very well indeed.

Paul Begg, renowned Ripper author.

This book reads as a well researched biography … Highly recommended.

Adrian Morris, Editor of ‘The Journal of the Whitechapel Society 1888’

It is a superbly researched biography and history book about one of the suspects.

Glynn Garlick,