I write about the strange and wonderful sides of history.

The child prodigy turned opium addict. The prophet who couldn’t get the end of the world right. The con-artist turned famous archaeologist. The headmaster who bludgeoned his wife to death, then sat wearily back down to his Latin.

I’m interested in how people relate to the past – and how those relationships go wrong. I take characters on the edges of conventional history and make them my heroes.

Cambridge University Press have just published my first book, Classical Victorians: Scholars, Scoundrels and Generals in Pursuit of Antiquity, as the inaugural title in their new Classics After Antiquity series.

I’m currently a Lecturer at the University of Leeds, in the Department of Classics. Before that, I worked at the University of Durham, and the University of Princeton.

My latest project is a history of forgetfulness – featuring the infamous trial of a classical con-artist in 1880s New York.