lol. I'm sure it's not dead yet.
I'll whizz over to Amazon to check these out, esp. the Blake, Duchess, and Pompadour. Thanks. 
By way of return, I really love Judith Flanders, The Victorian House from Childbirth to the Deathbed, just because it focuses on all those little things you wonder about when you think about life in the nineteenth-century (like cleanliness, and food, and servants, and plumbing), unless that's just me, of course.
On the strength of this I read A Circle of Sisters:Alice Kipling, Georgiana Burne-Jones, Agnes Poynter and Louisa Balwin. Also fascinating.
Am almost done with Liza Picard's Victorian London: The Life of the City 1840-1870. Not sure I'm really attuned to her humour so the colloquial asides are just irksome. I will check out the Ackroyd instead.
Had high hopes of Anthony Beevor's Stalingrad, which I finally got around to reading. Disappointing.