It is in regrettable circumstances that beautiful Judith Taverner and her brother Peregrine first encounter Julian St John Audley. The man, they both agree, is an insufferably arrogant dandy. But unfortunately for them, he is also the Fifth Earl of Worth, a friend of the Regent and, quite by chance, their legal guardian.

Author of over fifty books, Georgette Heyer is the best-known and best-loved of all historical novelists, who made the Regency period her own. Her first novel, The Black Moth, published in 1921, was written at the age of fifteen to amuse her convalescent brother; her last was My Lord John. Although most famous for her historical novels, she also wrote eleven detective stories. Georgette Heyer died in 1974 at the age of seventy-one.