A Divided Kingdom: Robert Harris on Act of Oblivion

Our editor met Robert Harris to talk about his latest novel set in the aftermath of the fall of Cromwell.

In preparation for my meeting with Robert Harris (of course I’d read his latest novel, Act of Oblivion), I read a number of interviews and listened to his Desert Island Discs with Kirsty Young. 12 years old now, it is a fascinating and enlightening episode, and gave an insight into a man who began his career at the BBC. In it he mentioned ‘politics is the drama of life’. Harris was The Observer’s Political Editor from 1987. Born to working class parents in 1957, he read English at Cambridge, and after Newsnight and Panorama at the BBC he moved to The Observer in 1987. He is now a hugely successful author and has been since his first, Fatherland, was published in 1992 to great acclaim. Having written about ancient Rome, the 1930s, and the Second World War, this is his first foray into the 1600s, but what a century for dramatic politics, with civil war, regicide, republic, restoration and revolution.