Writing and Research
Like many writers, I enjoy the research part of what I do rather more than the writing - although when it comes right it is a wonderful thing! When I embarked on an academic career, it was a fortunate thing that the British Academy thought highly enough of a degree from the then University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, to give me grants for first an M. Phil. and then a Ph. D. The former gave me an opportunity to indulge an interest in Roman Britain. 200 pages or so investigated the nature of the source material in Tacitus, Suetonius, and Dio Cassius between AD 39 and 84. The latter developed out of an interest in the revolt of Boudica, in particular the variant sources for the prodigy reports in Tacitus and Dio Cassius. It quickly grew into an appropriately monstrous project on the use of divination in the histories of Livy and Tacitus. From time to time I have pursued both interests in articles and reviews which you can find on these pages.
Still, I have never lost sight of another enduring passion - the world of aquatics: swimming (pool and open water), water polo, diving, synchro. Waterpolo International is a major project - an attempt to catalogue and to classify an entire bibliography of water polo. Apart from reflecting my own innate passion for taxonomy, this should provide researchers with necessary tools to begin their own researches and is, I hope, just the beginning of a more extensive, literary enquiry into the world of aquatics. This and other aquatics projects will be discovered here too!