ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Grant was one of the few classical historians to win respect from academics and a lay readership. Immensely prolific, he wrote and edited more than 50 books of nonfiction and translation, covering topics from Roman coinage and the eruption of Vesuvius to the Gospels and Christ.
“I have always wanted people to be better informed,” he once wrote, “and having absorbed over the years a certain, limited amount of information myself, I have wanted to pass it on as palatably as I can — first through academic channels, of which I have had the good fortune to be able to avail myself, and then through my own publications.” Such a prescription found shape in his books and in his career outside writing; he was for many years active in the British Council’s project to promote British culture overseas, and he taught classics at the universities of Cambridge and Edinburgh.
Michael Grant was born in 1914. Educated at Harrow, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1933 to read classics. After graduating, he took up a research fellowship to write the thesis that he would publish as his first book, From Imperium to Auctoritas, in 1946. Perhaps surprisingly, he began his writing career in academic numismatics. Over the ensuing decade he wrote four books on Roman coinage, arguing that the conflict between imperatorial eccentricity and the traditionalism of the Roman mint made coinage, used as propaganda and currency, a unique social record. Later he would become president and honorary fellow of the Royal Numismatic Society.
In 1939 the war interrupted his Cambridge career. After training, during which his closest associate was a fellow Trinity student, the spy Anthony Blunt, he joined the War Office in London. He spent a year in the capital on intelligence work. After a brief spell in Paris, whence he returned on the eve of German occupation, he was called for interview by Lord Lloyd, the chairman of the British Council. On the basis of the “little Turkish” which Grant had mentioned on his enlistment, he was appointed the British Council’s first representative to Turkey. “No one else seems to know any Turkish at all,” Lloyd told him. After a spell in Cairo to learn the ropes, Grant arrived in Ankara in September 1940.
The British Council had a brief to promulgate British culture and education, and Grant was pleased to be able to install many British teachers in Turkish schools. He later related that he had been partly responsible for getting his friend Steven (later Sir Steven) Runciman, the historian, his position at Ankara University.
On the day that Turkey broke off diplomatic relations with Germany and Japan, Grant was married, to Anne-Sophie Beskow.
In 1945 the couple returned to London with Grant’s collection of almost 700 Roman coins, which subsequently passed to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. His first book was published the next year.
Back in London he became deputy director of the British Council’s European division. The immediate postwar years were a time of great growth for the council, and he was called upon to travel in Austria, Hungary and Berlin.
In 1948, however, he returned to Cambridge with his family.
AUTHOR'S BOOKS | 
