Robert Harris calls his Berkshire home 'the house that Hitler built'
Robert Harris's first novel imagined a world in which Nazi Germany had won the Second World War. Fatherland sold so well that he quit journalism and bought a former vicarage, jokingly naming it after Hitler. Since then his historical thrillers have ranged from Pompeii and Cicero's Rome to a papal election.
Harris was born on 7 March 1957 and spent his childhood in a modest rented home on one of Nottingham's council estates. Visits to the printing works where his father was employed sparked his wish to write. At Selwyn College, Cambridge, he read English, edited the student paper Varsity and became president of the Cambridge Union. He then worked at the BBC on Panorama and Newsnight, and at 30 became political editor of The Observer.
His early books were non-fiction. The first, written with Jeremy Paxman in 1982, examined chemical and biological warfare; Selling Hitler dissected the forged Hitler Diaries scandal. Fatherland, published in 1992, let him write fiction full-time and became an HBO film. Enigma, about codebreaking at Bletchley Park, was adapted by Tom Stoppard with Kate Winslet. In 2003 Pompeii followed an aqueduct engineer who realises Vesuvius is about to blow, and a trilogy on the orator Cicero began with Imperium in 2006.
Politics fed the fiction. An early backer and donor of Tony Blair's New Labour, Harris fell out with him over the invasion of Iraq, then wrote The Ghost after Blair resigned in 2007. Its unseated prime minister, Adam Lang, is a thinly disguised Blair, and Harris hinted the title also alluded to Blair ghostwriting the case for war on behalf of President Bush. Roman Polanski filmed it as The Ghost Writer in 2010, shooting in Berlin and on the North Sea island of Sylt as stand-ins for London and Martha's Vineyard.
The pair collaborated again on An Officer and a Spy, the story of Georges Picquart uncovering the injustice done to Alfred Dreyfus. Harris's later novels hop across eras: the 1938 Munich summit seen through two young civil servants, the V-2 rocket campaign of 1944, a village in a far-future 1468, and a hunt for regicides after 1660. Conclave, set during 72 hours of a papal election, reached cinemas in 2024 starring Ralph Fiennes.
Source: Robert Harris (novelist)
