Biography
Grant was born in London, the son of Col. Maurice Grant who served in the Boer War and later wrote part of its official history. Young Grant attended Harrow and read classics (1933–37) at Trinity College, Cambridge. His specialty was academic numismatics. His research fellowship thesis later became his first published book — From Imperium to Auctoritas (1946), on Roman bronze coins. Over the next decade he wrote four books on Roman coinage; his view was that the tension between the eccentricity of the Roman emperors and the traditionalism of the Roman mint made coins (used as both propaganda and currency) a unique social record.
During World War II, Grant served for a year as an intelligence officer in London after which he was assigned (1940) as the UK's first British Council representative in Turkey. In this capacity he was instrumental in getting his friend, the eminent historian Steven (later Sir Steven) Runciman, his position at Ankara University. While in Turkey, he also married Anne-Sophie Beskow (they eventually had two sons). At war's end, the couple returned to the UK with Grant’s collection of almost 700 Roman coins (now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge).
After a brief return to Cambridge, Grant applied for the vacant chair of Humanity (Latin) at Edinburgh University which he held from 1948 until 1959. During a two year (1956–58) leave of absence he also served as vice-chancellor (president) of the University of Khartoum — upon his departure, he turned the university over to the newly independent Sudanese government. He was then vice-chancellor of Queen's University of Belfast (1959–66), after which he pursued a career as a full-time writer. According to his obituary in The Times he was "one of the few classical historians to win respect from academics and a lay readership". Immensely prolific, he wrote and edited more than 70 books of nonfiction and translation, covering topics from Roman coinage and the eruption of Mount Vesuvius to the Gospels. He produced general surveys of ancient Greek, Roman and Israelite history as well as biographies of giants such as Julius Caesar, Herod the Great, Cleopatra, Nero, Jesus, St. Peter and St. Paul.
As early as the 1950s, Grant's publishing success was somewhat controversial within the classicist community. According to The Times:
Grant’s approach to classical history was beginning to divide critics. Numismatists felt that his academic work was beyond reproach, but some academics balked at his attempt to condense a survey of Roman literature into 300 pages, and felt (in the words of one reviewer) that “even the most learned and gifted of historians should observe a speed-limit”. The academics would keep cavilling, but the public kept buying.
From 1966 until his death, Grant lived with his wife in Gattaiola, a village near Lucca in Tuscany. His autobiography, My First Eighty Years, appeared in 1994.
Read more about this topic: Michael Grant (author)
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