Poet and author. Born in an attic in Wimpole Street in 1946, I studied classics at Lady Margaret Hall Oxford  wrote a PhD on ideas of the mind in Greek tragedy and its society, taught Greek at Oxford and Birkbeck, College, while starting an M Phil on modern Cretan poetry at King's College London which I never finished, and went back to live in Crete instead, where i have lived on and off since 1970 and maintain close ties. In 1984 I left academic life and lived as a freelance writer - though I taught opera in the Modern Greek Department at Princeton for two semesters in 1995  - until I joined King's College in 2013. 

I write poetry, fiction and non-fiction, so my research intyerests are whatever book I am working on at the time. For example, I have just finished a collection of poems entitled 'Emerald' in which I researched emerald mining, the geology and crystal structure of emeralds, and the role of the Emerald Tablet in mediaeval alchemy and Jungian analysis, but all these came together in a volume about my miother's recent death. I am now turning back to an unfinished novel about Crete, with which I have had a lifelong relationship since 1970, in the second world war. My next book of poems will be about the life and work of Beethoven and Schubert.  Ihave published around 20 books to date, ten poetry collections, one novel and nine nonfiction.