I grew up in the countryside in England, was educated as a classicist at Oxford University and set off to spend the rest of my life as a bohemian wanderer in the eastern Mediterranean. But we know what happens to the best laid plans... Marriage, children: I ended up teaching, in Greece, Libya, then in London, for the first twenty years of my adult existence. And then I began writing: mostly about travel, mostly about Greece and France; guidebooks, travel journalism, accounts of journeys. My interest has remained the world I originally discovered as a classicist, the countries where Greek and Latin once were spoken, in particular the mountainous bits. I have done translations from and into French and Greek and I have a special interest in schizophrenia because of my own son's plight.