Nero - Couverture souple

David Wishart was born in Arbroath, Scotland, in 1952. He studied Classics at Edinburgh University, and after a spell of teaching Latin and Greek in secondary school retrained as a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, working for various companies in Kuwait, Greece and Saudi Arabia. He returned to Scotland in 1990, and lives in Carnoustie. His first book, ‘I, Virgil’ – a fictional ‘autobiography’ of the Roman poet –, was published in 1995; ‘Ovid’ – the first of the Marcus Corvinus series – followed a year later. Since then he has published a further 17 Corvinus books plus a novel-biography (‘Nero’) and a historical novel (‘The Horse Coin’) set in Roman Britain at the time of the Boudiccan revolt. His latest book, ‘Foreign Bodies’, was published in December 2015 by Severn House and he is currently working on his 19th. He is married to Rona, who is head of Support for Learning at St Leonards School, and has two children and four grandchildren.

‘A piece of advice before we start. Don’t believe those fools who preach that death is a friend, or worse, like Paullus and his crew of fanatics, the happy gateway to a better and fuller existence. It’s nothing of the sort. Death, gentle reader, is nothing but a necessary bore, and you can tell it I said so. There, now. If I really have to die before my time (and needs must, ho hum, when the emperor drives, even when the emperor is poor loopy Lucius) then I intend to savour every minute of the process. Even if it kills me.’ This is the Emperor Nero, seen through the not-wholly-unsympathetic eyes of his erstwhile friend and Arbiter of Taste, the author and aesthete Titus Petronius Niger, currently committing enforced (but comfortable and pleasantly prolonged) suicide at his villa in Cumae; the inside story, including the answer to the question of who did burn Rome, and why...