The Cicero Trilogy is of course a work of fiction and not a historical biography. At the same time it does give some insight into the politics in and of Rome, how they could have been. For anyone who like me in his youth read the Catilinarian Orations in Latin, in particular the book dedicated to that struggle is a very amusing and pleasing read. Historical accuracy may vary, of course, but overall I could not say that any one character was portrayed as one-dimensional. Matteo Garrone, Roberto Saviano, Maurizio Braucci, Ugo Chiti, Gianni Di Gregorio, and Massimo Gaudioso (2008)

An Officer and a Spy is the story of French officer Georges Picquart, a historical character, who is promoted in 1895 to run France's Statistical Section, its secret intelligence division. He gradually realises that Alfred Dreyfus has been unjustly imprisoned for acts of espionage committed by another man who is still free and still spying for the Germans. He risks his career and his life to expose the truth. Harris was inspired to write the novel by his friend Roman Polanski, who adapted it as a film in 2019. [ citation needed] Dictator (2015) [ edit ] On 2 December 2010, Harris appeared on the radio programme Desert Island Discs, when he spoke about his childhood and his friendships with Tony Blair and Roman Polanski. In 2003 Harris turned his attention to ancient Rome with his acclaimed Pompeii. The novel is about a Roman aqueduct engineer, working near the city of Pompeii just before the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. As the aqueducts begin to malfunction, he investigates and realises the volcano is shifting the ground beneath and is near eruption. Meanwhile, he falls in love with the young daughter of a powerful local businessman who was illicitly dealing with his predecessor to divert municipal water for his own uses, and will do anything to keep that deal going. [ citation needed] Imperium (2006) [ edit ] The second novel in the Cicero trilogy, Lustrum, was published in October 2009. It was released in February 2010 in the US under the alternative title of Conspirata. [ citation needed] The Fear Index (2011) [ edit ] Harris's bestselling first novel, the alternative-history Fatherland, has as its setting a world where Nazi Germany won the Second World War. Publication enabled Harris to become a full-time novelist. It was adapted as a television film by HBO in 1994. [ citation needed]How unreal it felt to watch the approach of this titan who had so dominated everyone’s thoughts for so many years---who had conquered countries and upended lives and sent thousands of soldiers marching hither and thither and had smashed the ancient republic to fragments as if it were nothing more substantial than a chipped antique vase that had gone out of fashion---to watch him, and to find him, in the end---just an ordinary breathing mortal!

But now, ten years after Charles’ beheading, the royalists have returned to power. Under the provisions of the Act of Oblivion, the fifty-nine men who signed the king’s death warrant and participated in his execution have been found guilty in absentia of high treason. Some of the Roundheads, including Oliver Cromwell, are already dead. Others have been captured, hung, drawn, and quartered. A few are imprisoned for life. But two have escaped to America by boat.The Harris novel The Fear Index, focusing on the 2010 Flash Crash, was published by Hutchinson in September 2011. It follows an American expat hedge fund operator living in Geneva who activates a new system of computer algorithms that he names VIXAL-4, which is designed to operate faster than human beings, but which begins to become uncontrollable by its human operators. It was adapted as a 4-part limited series starring Josh Hartnett in 2022. [ citation needed] An Officer and a Spy (2013) [ edit ] The obvious problem with setting a novel in ancient Rome is that there are already so many of them. Few people read Ben-Hur these days and probably even fewer read Quo Vadis. But Marguerite Yourcenar's fictionalised memoirs of Hadrian and Gore Vidal's evocative life of Julian are rightly remembered as classics of the genre and it is only a few years since Allan Massie brought the dying days of the republic and dawn of the empire to splendidly lurid life in his much underrated novel sequence. And even as the familiar cast is trooping on stage – Cicero the wordsmith, Catiline the conspirator, Crassus the tycoon, Cato the conservative – it is hard to resist the suspicion that we have been here many times before. The Second Sleep, published on 5 September 2019, [13] [14] is set in the small English village of Addicott St. George in Wessex in the year 1468 (but it is not "our" 1468; it's 800 years later than the 2020s) and follows the events of a priest, Christopher Fairfax, sent there to bury the previous priest, and the secrets he discovers: about the priest, the village, and the society in which they live. [ citation needed] V2 (2020) [ edit ] I also really liked that part of the intrigues were spun by the wives, sisters, widows of the main players and that these were shown as an integral part of Roman society.