Robert Harris

Robert Dennis Harris (born 7 March 1957) is a British novelist and former journalist.

Although he began his career in journalism and non-fiction, his fame rests upon his works of historical fiction.

Beginning with the best-seller Fatherland, Harris focused on events surrounding the Second World War, followed by works set in ancient Rome.

His most recent works centre on contemporary history.

Harris was educated at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he was president of the Cambridge Union and editor of the student newspaper Varsity.

Robert Harris spent his childhood in a small rented house on a Nottingham council estate.

His ambition to become a writer arose at an early age, from visits to the local printing plant where his father worked.

Harris went to Belvoir High School in Bottesford, Leicestershire, and then King Edward VII School, Melton Mowbray, where a hall was later named after him.

There he wrote plays and edited the school magazine.

He lived at 17 Fleming Avenue.

Harris read English literature at Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he was elected president of the Cambridge Union and editor of Varsity, the oldest student newspaper at Cambridge University.

After leaving Cambridge, Harris joined the BBC and worked on news and current affairs programmes such as Panorama and Newsnight.

Harris co-wrote his first book, A Higher Form of Killing (1982), with fellow BBC journalist Jeremy Paxman: this was a study of chemical and biological warfare.

Other non-fiction works followed: ''Gotcha!

The Government, the Media and the Falklands Crisis (1983) covering the Falklands War; The Making of Neil Kinnock (1984), a profile of Kinnock just after he became leader of the Opposition; Selling Hitler (1986), an investigation of the Hitler Diaries scandal; and Good and Faithful Servant'' (1990), a study of Bernard Ingham, press secretary to Margaret Thatcher while she was prime minister.

Harris's bestselling first novel, the alternative-history Fatherland, has as its setting a world where Nazi Germany won the Second World War.

Publication enabled Harris to become a full-time novelist.

In 1987, at the age of 30, he became political editor of the newspaper The Observer.

He later wrote regular columns for The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph.

It was adapted as a television film by HBO in 1994.

Harris has stated that the proceeds from the book enabled him to buy a former vicarage in Berkshire that he jokingly dubbed "the house that Hitler built", where he still lives.

His second novel, Enigma, portrayed the breaking of the German Enigma cipher during the Second World War at Cambridge University and Bletchley Park.

It was adapted as a film by writer Tom Stoppard, starring Dougray Scott and Kate Winslet, in 2001.

Archangel was another international best seller.

It follows a British historian in contemporary Russia as he hunts for a secret notebook, believed to be Stalin's diary.

In 2003 Harris turned his attention to ancient Rome with Pompeii. The novel is about a Roman aqueduct engineer, working near the city of Pompeii just before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE.

As the aqueducts begin to malfunction, he investigates and realises the volcano is shifting the ground beneath and is near eruption.

Meanwhile, he falls in love with the young daughter of a powerful local businessman who was illicitly dealing with his predecessor to divert municipal water for his own uses, and will do anything to keep that deal going.

It was adapted as a television film by the BBC, starring Daniel Craig, in 2005.

In 2006, Harris followed up on Pompeii with another Roman-era work, Imperium, the first novel in a trilogy centred on the life of the great Roman orator and lawyer Marcus Tullius Cicero.

Harris was an early and enthusiastic supporter of Tony Blair (a personal acquaintance) and a donor to New Labour, but the war in Iraq blunted his enthusiasm.

"We had our ups and downs, but we didn't really fall out until the invasion of Iraq, which made no sense to me," Harris has said.

In 2007, after Blair resigned, Harris dropped his other work to write The Ghost.

The title refers both to a professional ghostwriter, whose lengthy memorandum forms the novel, and to his immediate predecessor who, as the action opens, has just drowned in gruesome and mysterious circumstances.

The dead man has been ghosting the autobiography of a recently unseated British prime minister called Adam Lang, a thinly veiled version of Blair.

The fictional counterpart of Cherie Blair is depicted as a sinister manipulator of her husband.

Harris told The Guardian before publication: "The day this appears a writ might come through the door. But I would doubt it, knowing him."

Harris said in a U.S. National Public Radio interview that politicians like Lang and Blair, particularly when they have been in office for a long time, become divorced from everyday reality, read little and end up with a pretty limited overall outlook.

When it comes to writing their memoirs, they therefore tend to have all the more need of a ghostwriter.

Harris hinted at a third, far less obvious, allusion hidden in the novel's title, and, more significantly, at a possible motive for having written the book in the first place.