Robert Harris

1957

Robert Harris writes historical and counterfactual thrillers with a strong interest in political systems, secrecy, corruption and power.

Robert Harris was born in Nottingham in 1957 and studied English at the University of Cambridge. He worked as a journalist for the BBC, The Sunday Times and The Observer, covering politics and current affairs before becoming a full-time novelist. His experience of government, media and political scandal gave him a detailed understanding of how institutions protect information and how individuals behave under public pressure.

Harris’s first novel, Fatherland, imagines a 1960s Europe in which Nazi Germany won the Second World War. He followed it with historical and political thrillers including Enigma, Archangel, Pompeii and the Cicero trilogy, which reconstructs the fall of the Roman Republic through the secretary Tiro. An Officer and a Spy revisits the Dreyfus affair, while Munich, V2 and Act of Oblivion examine diplomacy, technology and political pursuit in different periods. Harris builds suspense from documents, procedures and competing versions of truth. His work is especially suitable for readers interested in political systems, state secrecy and historical moments when apparently stable institutions begin to fail.

Periods and events

Catilinarian Conspiracy Late Roman Republic Caesar’s Civil War Assassination of Julius Caesar Restoration Puritan New England Holocaust Nazi Germany World War I Bletchley Park Codebreaking Battle of the Atlantic Soviet Era Liberators’ Civil War War of Actium

Series

Series by Robert Harris (1 series)

Cicero Trilogy in Order

by Robert Harris 3 books 4.3

Robert Harris’s Cicero Trilogy reconstructs the final decades of the Roman Republic through Tiro, Cicero’s enslaved secretary and eventual freedman. Imperium follows the advocate’s prosecution of Verres and campaign for the consulship; Lustrum places his consulship inside the Catilinarian crisis; and Dictator carries him through exile, Caesar’s civil…