‘He left the world in ruins’: the author who defied the Taliban and burning tyres to tell Alexander the Great’s epic story
He was the most powerful man in the world but he was brought down by one battle too many after a decade at the top. The story of Alexander the Great might be more than 2,000 years old, but it seems timely that a new biography of the ancient ruler won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction just as President Trump took a battering in the US midterms. “This is a moment,” says its author Edmund Richardson, “where people are finding that there are limits to what unlimited wealth and power can do, and that humanity catches up with you, whether you like it or not. Alexander wants to transform the world – and he leaves it in ruins.”
Wearing a purple velvet jacket, purple scarf and matching socks, with a high forehead and corona of auburn curls, Richardson himself might have stepped out of an earlier age. It is hard to imagine anyone less like history’s favourite mob boss than this softly spoken professor of classics. We are having coffee at the offices of the PR company for the Baillie Gifford prize, the view of the City of London skyline from the floor to ceiling windows a reminder of 21st-century power and economics.
It would, we agree, have made the perfect backdrop for an interview with Patrick Radden Keefe, a previous winner of the £50,000 Baillie Gifford prize and the favourite this year for London Falling, a forensic investigation into the death of a teenager who falls from one of the city’s luxury skyscrapers. “I would never, ever have imagined this,” Richardson says, almost in a whisper. “I am fully expecting someone to tap me on the shoulder and say, ‘I’m so sorry, there’s been a terrible mistake, Mr Radden Keefe is waiting. You can take a coffee as you go.’”
Richardson’s exhilarating, exhaustively researched Alexander: God, Man, King is another triumph for the classics in a year when Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey stormed the box office (Alexander liked to sleep with a copy of Homer under his pillow, apparently). Like many, Richardson first encountered the figure in the pages of Alexander, Mary Renault’s 1969 fictional trilogy, when he was a boy. Critics have described his book as “part novel, part history”.
Richardson doesn’t just make the ruler of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon flesh and blood for a new generation. He also makes bold claims for his subject. “Alexander reshaped reality more profoundly than almost anyone else in history,” he writes. His expansionist campaigns might have been brutal, even by ancient standards, with his empire unravelling before his death, but for Richardson its true legacy is in the “ripple effects” that we still feel today. “It’s in the ways that Babylonian science turns up in Greece, that Greek art turns up on the borders of the Indus, that Egyptian scholarship finds its way into how we understand Homer. It’s in the world becoming far more connected.” He was antiquity’s answer to the internet.
“Alexander’s story is on this impossible scale,” he says. “This is someone who is capable of extraordinary violence and cruelty, extraordinary kindness and love.” Richardson describes the book as a “beautiful monster” to write. From Plutarch to Horrible Histories, there have been countless takes on his story: the boy from the Macedon hills, who became king aged 20 in 336BC after his father was assassinated; marched his army into the heart of the Persian empire; had conquered much of the known world by the time he was 30, killing 1% of the population along the way; and who died “brokenhearted” in Babylon aged 32.
“Up until this book,” says Richardson, “my thing has always been writing stuff that no one reads about people no one has heard of. That’s my happy place!” His previous book, Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City, was a biography of 19th-century archaeologist Charles Masson. But when his editor suggested he write about Alexander himself, he was horrified. “The idea of coming up against Alexander, and all of these thousands of versions of his story written by some of the people I admire the most in the world – absolute terror!”
Richardson, however, wanted to discover the real Alexander, before he became “great”. His search took him on his own decade-long adventure from the storage rooms of the British Museum in London to the catacombs of Egypt and the foothills of the Himalayas. Computer simulation and new discoveries gave him access to evidence and contemporary sources unavailable to earlier historians. But his travels back in time were interrupted by modern-day unrest. “There was a short encounter with a barricade of burning tyres,” he says, referring to a protest he stumbled upon in Cairo, while his visit to Afghanistan was abandoned after the Taliban ransacked his hotel.
“Terrible things tend to happen to people who take up papyrus or laptop to write the Alexander story,” he says. The first, Callisthenes, Aristotle’s great nephew, was crucified, according to some sources. “So for me, there was a sense of the story being something that consumes people. I felt my own fallibility as a writer, as a historian, vividly.” He also had to confront his own mortality.
Around three years ago, Richardson was diagnosed with cancer. He first had a melanoma as a teenager and “they’ve been back a couple of times since”. At this point, he was barely 40. “I was writing this book not knowing if I would be around when it was out in the world,” he says. He wasn’t even sure if he would finish it. His universe narrowed to the fluorescent lights and corridors of hospital. Writing became his way of travelling – “but to the world of ideas. The book, and the people I loved, reminded me that there was a version of myself that was less frightening.”
Although he was given the all clear, this time last year he was back in hospital after he collapsed, probably due to all the stress. When he came round the next day, two patients on his ward were handcuffed to police officers. “And there was me with my laptop and my hieroglyphs,” he laughs. It was a turning point, though. He had been struggling with the ending (“Obviously everyone dies and everything goes wrong”) but he returned to his “tangled” manuscript with “a feeling of trying to find a ray of hope where the light seemed to have gone out”.
Richardson, now 44, grew up in Bristol, the only child of two academics. His father, an American, is a mathematician; his mother, who is part-English and part-Irish, is an art historian. There were “layers upon layers” of books in the house. He went to a Bristol grammar school, where he thought he might follow his father into maths, but he couldn’t resist the ancient world.
“Obsessions are my weakness,” he says. “Even when I was a kid, I would find myself getting lost in stories and falling down rabbit holes.” He made it to Cambridge to study classics, where he was taught by Mary Beard. On a postdoctoral fellowship to Princeton, he met his fiance, “the love of my life”, the journalist and writer Yepoka Yeebo, who was studying at Columbia. They lived together in New York, before returning to London. “If there is good in what I write, it is her,” he whispers. “She makes me see the world entire, the wonder of things.”
His next subject – although his editor doesn’t know it yet – is the British Egyptologist Flinders Petrie. “I’m going back to books about people no one has ever heard of,” he says. “It’s the story of an archaeologist who, in the deserts of Egypt in 1888, thinks that he’s come up with a plan to defeat death.”
More immediately, he’s off to the BBC next, to talk more about Alexander. “It’s very strange as an academic to find people actually wanting to listen to what you say,” he jokes. “I feel so, so honoured.” Why does he think there is such interest the ancient world today? “It’s not just a story about the distant past,” he says. “We work with fragments, with ghosts, with things that have almost vanished – but that also lets us make these stories our own. There’s no such thing as the definitive book about Alexander. You know that there will be so many books after yours.”
How does he feel about his 10-year battle with Alexander ending in victory? “There have been some difficult times,” he admits. “It’s lovely to come out of that and into light.”