Robert Harris CBE (born 1957) has had a spectacularly successful career. He went from a humble background in Nottingham, to Cambridge University, and then to the BBC where he worked on flagship news programmes Panorama and Newsnight before becoming political editor of The Observer at the age of just 30.

In the later 1980s he wrote half a dozen factual journalistic books, and then in 1992 published the first of his fiction books, ‘Fatherland’, which became a popular bestseller. Since then he has kept up an impressive workrate, producing a new novel in the popular thriller genre, every three or so years.

The first few were set against the Second World War which has been a recurring setting (‘Fatherland’, ‘Enigma’, ‘Munich’, ‘V2’) but he soon branched out, writing page-turners set in the contemporary world, (‘The Ghost’, ‘The Fear Index’), late nineteenth century France (‘An Officer and a Spy’), the ancient world (‘Pompeii’), the future (‘The Second Sleep’). In 2006 he embarked upon a brilliant trilogy based on the life of Cicero, the leading writer and political player at the time of Caesar, Mark Anthony and Octavian.

Several of Harris’s novels have been adapted into films – for example, The Ghost Writer (2010), An Officer and a Spy (2019) – but he recently hit gold when ‘Conclave’ was made into a movie directed by Edward Berger with award-nominated performances by Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci.

Harris’s novels

1992 Fatherland A brilliantly gripping alternative history in which the Nazis won the Second World War. The story’s protagonist, Xavier March, is an officer of the Kripo, the criminal police, who is investigating the murder of a Nazi government official who participated at the Wannsee Conference. Slowly he realises he has stumbled on a vast conspiracy at the heart of Nazi rule, the Holocaust which, in this world, has been hushed up. The documents March eventually uncovers contain some of the most searing descriptions of going into the gas chambers of a concentration camp I’ve read in any genre.

1995 Enigma Enigma as in the famous code-cracking operation at Bletchley Park. The story focuses on gifted cryptanalyst Tom Jericho, recuperating in Cambridge from a nervous breakdown brought on by the pressures of work and the breakup of his relationship with Claire Romilly, a cipher clerk, but when he gets back to Cambridge, Claire has gone missing. Who? Why? Where? Another gripping mystery.

1998 Archangel Set in the present: Christopher ‘Fluke’ Kelso is a historian attending a conference in Moscow. He meets an old communist who tells him about a secret notebook which contains a secret concerning Stalin which threatens to turn history upside down.

2007 The Ghost The unnamed ghost writer who narrates the story, has been hired and flown to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to help write the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, transparently based in Tony Blair, who Harris was close to. The unexplained disappearance of the writer whose place he’s taken prompts the narrator to undertake investigations which (like the previous two thrillers) lead to a momentous revelation.

2011 The Fear Index Also set in the modern world, this concerns the way an artificial intelligence created to dabble in the stock market, runs out of control.

2013 An Officer and a Spy Leaping back a century, this one follows French military intelligence officer Georges Picquart who begins to discover that the evidence used to convict Alfred Dreyfus of espionage was likely invented, in which case a German agent is still at large in the French military.

2016 Conclave Set in the present, this bestseller describes in typically thorough fashion what happens when Pope dies and a conclave is called to elect a new one: taking us into the heart of the process during which various leading contenders turn out to be ineligible for all manner of Machiavellian reasons. Clever, gripping.

2017 Munich Set over four days in September 1938 during the Munich Agreement, the novel describes the activities of two characters, aides to the British and Nazi delegations. This has the structure and mannerisms of the previous thrillers but, for the first time, didn’t have the same ‘grip’. All the historical detail is there, and the panic-stricken meetings and the twists and turns. Except we know this changed nothing. The Second World War still came. So who cares?

2019 Second Sleep Set in the future after some disaster has set England back to medieval technology and culture. In this world a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives at a remote village in the wilds of Exmoor to bury a priest who has died ‘in mysterious circumstances’. Slowly he realises the locals are concealing a secret i.e. the book builds to the same kind of Revelation that characterised Harris’s first half dozen novels. Except the final revelation is deeply underwhelming: we find out that the Old World (i.e. our world) experienced some catastrophic breakdown of its digital infrastructure. This is deeply disappointing because a) we knew right from the start that this was a future after some catastrophe; b) so it is just like many, many other science fiction novels set in the future after some catastrophe wiped out ‘our’ culture, all the ones I’m familiar with (The Chrysalids, A Canticle for Leibowitz) being much, much better; and c) the final revelation, that the satellites which keep global digital tech working all crashed, is not really a believable cause for a worldwide apocalypse. OK there’d be disasters but surely we’d just revert to life in the 1970s before digital tech: cars would still drive, food would still grow, not as much but still quite a lot; livestock would be farmed etc etc. The idea that the end of digital tech would devastate the world beyond recognition is not plausible or thrilling. This is the first Harris novel I read but couldn’t be bothered to review because it’s the first one that’s actively bad.

The Cicero trilogy

A brilliant trilogy of novels describing the fraught political career of ancient Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator and writer, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC). They manage to stick very closely to the historical record while at the same time conveying the genuine excitement and danger of 1st century BC Rome.

2006 Imperium All three are narrated by Cicero’s secretary, Tiro. This first volume covers 15 years and is divided into two parts: Part one, ‘Senator’ (79 to 70 BC) leading up to Cicero’s career-making prosecution of a corrupt Roman governor, Gaius Verres; Part two, ‘Praetorian (68 to 64 BC)’ covers his campaign to be elected consul, which becomes entangled with a major plot by Julius Caesar and Marcus Licinius Crassus to stitch up control of the Roman state.

2009 Lustrum Continues Cicero’s career in fraught first century BC Rome, as related by his secretary Tiro. It covers the next five years in Cicero’s life and career (the Latin word lustrum referring to the religious sacrifice offered every five years by state officials)and is again divided into two parts: Part one ‘Consul’, covers the dramatic year of 63 BC giving a thrilling description of the slow escalation of the crisis which developed into Lucius Sergius Catalina’s conspiracy to overthrow the Roman state. Part two, ‘Pater Patriae’, covers the next four years, 62 to 58 BC: beneath a blizzard of more overt incidents and challenges, the two underlying themes are the unstoppable rise of Caesar and his creation of the First Triumvirate (in 60 BC).

2015 Dictator The final book in the trilogy covers the last 15 years of Cicero’s life, from 58 BC to his murder at the hands of agents of Mark Antony in 44 BC. It’s divided into Part one, ‘Exile’ (58 to 47 BC), and Part two ‘Redux (47 to 43 BC), leading up to Cicero’s flight form Rome and eventual murder by agents of Mark Anthony’s. Outstanding.