Growing up, did you already have a fascination with ancient history? Were there any particular formative moments or people that inspired you? 

There was one formative moment in particular. When I was 5 years old, my Mum took me for my first visit to London (we lived in Shropshire). The British Museum was one of the places we visited. I wanted to see the Egyptian mummies of course, but we also went to see the remains of ancient Egyptian life, not merely death.

At the back of one case Mum spotted a carbonised piece of Egyptian cake, 3000 or more years old. I was desperate to see it (ancient cake!), but the case was too high for me to see, even when Mum picked me up. At that moment a man walked past, and stopped to ask me what I was trying to see. “That piece of cake” I squealed. He must have been a curator, because he took some keys out of his pocket, unlocked the case and brought the cake out for me to admire! It was a moment of wonderment, which I never forgot. I have no idea who the curator was, but he introduced me to the excitement of the ordinary things from the distant past (and he taught me about the importance of opening cases for curious kids).

I didn’t go on to be an Egyptologist. But that sense of wonderment has stayed with me in confronting any part of the ancient past, whether it’s reading Roman tombstones or trying out ancient lavatories.

What drew you to focus particularly on ancient Rome?

I have always been a bit ambidextrous between Greece and Rome, but I’ve been drawn more to the latter. That came partly from archaeology. When I was a teenager I dug on Romano-British sites in Shropshire, and I got the same buzz at the immediate connection with the past as I got from the Egyptian cake. I never found anything of any glamour, no gold jewellery and hardly a silver coin. But just to be the first person in 2000 years to touch a little piece of broken pottery was exciting enough.

Later on, when I was teaching and researching at university, it was the complexity of ancient Roman history that hooked me. The city of Rome had a population of about a million in the first century CE, the largest city in the West until 19th century London; and the empire probably had 50 million or so inhabitants, of a very modern-style diversity. The Romans were dealing with some of the questions that still face us: how do you ensure civil liberties in a vast polity? What are the consequences of exploitative imperialism? What is a multi-cultural society?

You’ve been a passionate advocate for making ancient history more accessible. Why do you think it’s so important that more people know about it, and in what ways can such knowledge benefit us?

Curiosity is one thing. It’s important to realise that we are not the first people on the planet, and to find out about those who have been here before us. I don’t think that either the Greeks or Romans have direct lessons for us. They don’t offer off-the-peg solutions to modern problems. But they do give us a different perspective on those problems.

I talked to some high school students recently who were debating freedom of speech. They imagined that this was a modern problem, a consequence of social media. When I introduced them to the trial and death of Socrates they were amazed. But more importantly, it gave them a safe space to have a more open discussion of the issues involved. When they were discussing modern social media, they were very guarded, always looking over their shoulders at how their arguments were landing with their friends. They felt liberated when they discussed Socrates, free to be for or against him, and so were able to actually get to the heart of it.

When you’re in the process of writing a book, what does a typical working day look like? Where do you usually write and how do you structure your writing time?

I sit down in the little library we have at home (nothing grand), and just stick at it from around 8:30 to 17:00. I’m satisfied if I finish the day further ahead than the night before, even by just 100 words. If I get 1000 words written, I am over the moon. If I do more than that, it’s an iron rule that the words won’t be any good. I used to be a night writer, but no longer. Now, I use the evenings to prepare for the next day, but I don’t even try to write any finished text.

From initial conception, to research, to drafting and editing, what aspects do you find most enjoyable and what most challenging?

The enjoyment is largely retrospective. It is hugely pleasurable to have completed a paragraph that says what I want it to say. But if I’m honest, the actual process is less pleasurable. I’m also always surprised how long the final stages take, when you feel you have already finished. My aim in my books for general readers is not to have footnotes, but to have a ‘Further Reading’ section at the end. I always intend to keep the notes for this, as I go along. But I never do. If you’re on a roll, it’s very hard to stop for references. So, I end up trying to reconstruct it all at the end, searching through old notebooks, and a good deal of Googling. Where was that reference to the ambassadors from China to Rome? It’s unavoidable, but dreary work.

You’ve brought classical history to a very wide audience, particularly your enormously successful 2015 work SPQR. Is broad accessibility something you consciously consider when writing your books and how do you go about achieving that?

I always think very hard about who I am writing for and what the reader’s experience will be. That’s the case for both specialist and more general books. It should not only be a question of what the writer wants to say, important as that is, but what he or she wants the reader to hear. For me, that’s all there is to it. My general books are not ‘easier’ than my specialist books. It is a terrible insult to the general reader to imagine they are looking for something easy. But it is also an insult to include loads of untranslated Latin, or to refer blithely to ‘proconsular power’ or arcane details of Roman law, without explanation.

What’s on your bookshelf at the moment?

Elif Shafak’s There are Rivers in the Sky. Partly because we are doing an event together, discussing its themes, but I would be reading it anyway, it’s great. Apart from that, I am preparing a lecture about museums – the controversies around them, their disruptive potential and so on. So, I’ve been reading a whole clutch of crime novels set in museums, Murder in the National Gallery, Murder at the Smithsonian etc. You’d be amazed how many there are!