Alfred Duggan

Alfred Duggan published his first novel at forty-seven after two decades as a drunk, and wrote fifteen more historical novels of unusual accuracy in the seventeen years he had left. He was born in Buenos Aires to a wealthy Argentine-Irish family, and after his father's death his mother married Lord Curzon, so he grew up at Hackwood and Montacute. At Oxford he belonged to the Hypocrites Club with Evelyn Waugh, who described him as the most dedicated drinker of a hard-drinking generation. He spent the 1930s travelling, financing an archaeological expedition, joining the British Union of Fascists briefly, and drinking. He was dried out in a sanatorium, worked in an aircraft factory during the war, and began writing in 1950. The novels cover the Roman empire, the Norman conquest, the crusades and the Byzantine world, and their distinguishing quality is that his characters hold the beliefs of their own period rather than modern ones: his Romans and his crusaders are not embarrassed by their assumptions. Family Favourites, published in 1960, narrates the reign of Elagabalus from the point of view of a praetorian guardsman, and takes in the Antonine constitution of 212 that made almost every free inhabitant of the empire a citizen. Waugh reviewed him generously. Waugh's memoirs describe him with a mixture of affection and horror, and the account of his drinking at Oxford is among the more startling passages in them. Duggan's later sobriety was total. He wrote a novel a year, worked from primary sources where he could read them, and Thomas Becket, Conscience of the King and Winter Quarters are still recommended.

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