Harry Sidebottom

Harry Sidebottom read ancient history at Lancaster, earned an MPhil at Manchester and a doctorate at Oxford, where he has taught as Fellow and Tutor in ancient history at St Benet's Hall and as a lecturer at Lincoln College. He was raised in Newmarket, Suffolk, where his father trained racehorses, and published the short survey Ancient Warfare: A Very Short Introduction in 2004 before turning to fiction with Fire in the East, the opening of a nine-book Warrior of Rome sequence. Blood and Steel (2015) is the middle volume of a second series, Throne of the Caesars, which runs from Iron and Rust to Fire and Sword across the years AD 235 to 238. Blood and Steel itself sits in 238, the year Rome ran through six emperors. The Return (2020) stands apart from both. Its setting is 145 BC and its central figure Gaius Furius Paullus, a soldier home on the family farm in Bruttium, who becomes the chief suspect once bodies begin turning up near his village. Sidebottom later wrote a life of the emperor Heliogabalus.