Wondering where to start with my books? 

If you want an overview of the period I’m most interested in, start with The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History of the Italian Renaissance. The dramatic story of the Italian peninsula through its sixteenth-century wars, giving a new perspective on the famous names. Read more.

If you like stories about individuals, try The Black Prince of Florence: The Spectacular Life and Treacherous World of Alessandro de’ Medici. My biography of the first Medici duke of Florence, said to be the illegitimate son of an enslaved African woman. Read more. 

Or, if you prefer an English focus, try Our Man in Rome: Henry VIII and his Italian Ambassador (also known as The Divorce of Henry VIII: The Untold Story). Divorce. Deceit. Diplomacy: the history of a man at the heart of the negotiations for Henry VIII’s first divorce. Read more.

Putting all this history into a much bigger and longer story, with an element of travel writing, is The Roads to Rome: A Journey Into Europe’s Past. As Charles Dickens wrote, on the Roman road network we can find ‘a history in every stone that strews the ground’. I explore that history over two thousands years. Read more.

Somewhat more focused and academic, but still (I hope) accessible to people new to the topic is The Firearm Revolution: From Renaissance Italy to the European Empires. It tells the story of how society dealt with guns when they were a new technology. Read more.

Finally, my first academic book was Diplomacy in Renaissance Rome. It’s a thematic account of the rise of permanent embassies in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with a focus on practice at Europe’s most important diplomatic centre, the papal court in Rome. Read more.