Fellow historical fiction fiends: you will be painfully aware that there"s some shocking stuff out there. Bad writing that screws with the facts and gives readers some very worrying ideas about historical figures. So thank goodness for Sarah Dunant. Blood and Beauty is Dunant"s tenth novel, and her fourth to be set in Renaissance Italy. In her first three she steered clear of "famous" figures and gave us stories of strong, ordinary women, so an epic novel about the notorious Borgia family is something of a departure. Given her exhaustive research for her other novels, though (she spends a year in the British Library researching each book; for her third she lived in a Milanese convent for a week), she is pretty well-qualified for the undertaking. Blood and Beauty spans the period from 1492 to 1502, focusing on Rodrigo Borgia, who is elected as Pope Alexander VI as the novel opens, and his children Cesare and Lucrezia. The plot follows the facts: over the next...