Guy De la Bédoyère

I was born in 1957 in Wimbledon. I went to the Universities of Durham and London, studying History and Archaeology (including Egyptology), and took an MA in Archaeology at University College, London. I worked for the BBC for most of the time between 1981 and 1999 but had started writing books on Roman Britain for Batsford by the late 1980s. In 1998 the Channel 4 TV series Time Team asked me to take part and I soon became a regular participant as 'Roman expert' between then and 2011. People often ask me about that though it seems a very long time ago now. Despite my name, I'm not French. My mother was from Glasgow and even my father was almost entirely of English, Scottish, and Anglo-Irish by descent. One of my great privileges is that being independent, as opposed to be tied to a university position, means I can pursue my interests in any direction they take me. Although I have mainly written on the Romans, I have also been able to publish books on the seventeenth-century diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys, and now ancient Egypt. One of my most popular books is Roman Britain. A New History for Thames and Hudson. Since 2014 I have been writing for Yale University Press, producing The Real Lives of Roman Britain (2015), Praetorian (2017, and Domina (2018). My survey book of the Roman army, Gladius, was published by Little, Brown in 2020, followed by my history of Egypt's 18th Dynasty, Pharaohs of the Sun, in July 2022, and after that Populus (2024) and for Yale again The Fall of Egypt and the Rise of Rome (2024). In 2025 I produced The Confessions of Samuel Pepys. His Private Revelations. This included the first new transcriptions of the original shorthand text for half a century, correcting a number of errors in past editions and was fascinating to compile and write.