Ferdinand Addis

I've been teasing away at the story of Rome since I was a boy, reading Livy on the beach and drawing little maps in the sand of Caere and Veii and Alba Longa. It was Rosemary Sutcliff who first got me hooked on the rain-swept romance of Roman Britain, and its half-remembered hills.

As a writer, I'm drawn to the grand scale, and to the scale of the individual human, and, above all, to the appalling tension between one and the other. My conviction is that we all share a great burden, which is to live in history. My own human-scale life, when I'm out of my books, takes place very happily, however, in North London with my wife and two daughters. I have occasionally contributed to the gaiety of nations by attempting to rock climb, though any amusement I may have caused will go only a very little way towards repairing the damage from my attempts to play the violin.