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"It’s a novel about the Roman emperor Heliogabalus. He’s viewed through the eyes of a fairly staid, fairly conventional Gallic Roman nobleman. This is one of the very few books that actually changed my life. I read it when I was an undergraduate. It’s the first time I’d ever heard of the emperor Heliogabalus, also known as Elagabalus. I became fascinated by him and actually did my master’s thesis on him. I then applied to Cambridge and Oxford to do my doctorate on him. At that point, writing a biography was very unfashionable in academe, so I ended up writing about the sources that wrote about him instead of about him. But I’m just finishing a book with the not-at-all-shouty title of The Mad Emperor Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome . My original working title was Sex and Death: Heliogabalus and the Decadence of Rome , but my publisher changed it. So this is a book that really interested me in a period of history that otherwise I wouldn’t have known. What’s so good about this novel—and, indeed, all Alfred Duggan’s novels, he wrote an awful lot of them, nonfiction too—is that although he didn’t really engage all that much with contemporary scholarship, he did read all the primary sources and thought about them. That really shines through at the level of day-to-day life. It’s a theme I keep going back to, the attitudes and mentalities of the characters. He somehow recreates them in a believable way, even though they are sometimes a little Christian—Duggan himself was a very devout Catholic, a convert. There is a sort of morality and a duty to his characters, but he managed to shape that into the morality and duty of the times he writes about. It’s also interesting because Alfred Duggan when he was in his heyday was a genre novelist, but he wrote so well that lots and lots of literary novelists admired him enormously, including Evelyn Waugh. He’s one of those novelists, a bit like Mary Renault or Patrick O’Brian, who stopped being regarded as a genre novelist in that slightly dismissive way and was just thought of as a novelist. Yes he was part of what is now called the ‘Brideshead set’ . Heliogabalus was a 13- or 14-year-old boy from a Syrian family when, in AD218, his grandmother engineered a civil war that put him on the throne. She clearly wanted him to be a puppet ruler. She’s an elderly woman. She’s lived at the imperial court for almost half a century, and she wanted someone to rule through. Unfortunately, her grandson wasn’t that amenable. He was an absolute devotee of a Syrian god called Elagabal, and he ignored every duty of being Roman emperor in favour of worshipping his god, which was a huge black stone. He carted it all the way from what is now Homs to Rome. He installed it at the head of the Roman pantheon and married a vestal virgin. He offended traditional Roman and religious sentiment in every way he could. If there was a social barrier, a no-no, he went ahead and did it, whether in religion, in politics, or sexuality. He was an extraordinary figure and he makes a great lens through which to view the Romans. You can almost work out what normal Roman attitudes to anything were by looking at what Heliogabalus did—and it will be the opposite. He’s fascinating. Now, for some of the wilder fringes of the LGBTQ+ community, he has become something of an icon. That only really works if you concentrate on his sexuality and the fact he may have wanted a sex change—and ignore the fact that he was massively irresponsible and exceedingly violent. It’s hard to say. Duggan was very influenced by the late 19th century Decadent movement, which had already reclaimed Heliogabalus, not as a perverted madman or religious nutter, but as the ultimate aesthete. I think it was that that really caught Duggan’s attention, especially as he moved in Harold Acton’s aesthetic set in Oxford."