Robert Dennis Harris (born 7 March 1957) is an British journalist, novelist and screenwriter.
A former BBC television reporter, he began his writing career in non-fiction, but he is more widely known for his best-selling novels. These focus on events surrounding the Second World War, Ancient Rome and contemporary history. Some of his novels have been made into films; for two of them, he wrote the screenplays himself. He is the brother-in-law of Nick Hornby.
No relation to Thomas Harris.
Novels
- Fatherland (1992)
- Made into a film in 1994
- Enigma (1995)
- Made into a film in 2001, starring Kate Winslet
- Archangel (1998)
- Made into a TV film in 2005, starring Daniel Craig
- Pompeii (2003)
- The Cicero Trilogy
- Imperium (2006)
- Lustrum (2009)
- Dictator (2015)
- The Ghost (2007)
- Made into a film in 2010
- The Fear Index (2011)
- An Officer and a Spy (2013)
- Made into a film in 2019
- Conclave (2016)
- Munich (2017)
- Made into a film in 2022
- The Second Sleep (2019)
- V2 (2020)
- Act of Oblivion (2022)
Screenplays
- The Ghost Writer (2010)
- An Officer and a Spy (2019)
Non-fiction
- A Higher Form of Killing: The Secret Story of Gas and Germ Warfare (with Jeremy Paxman) (1982)
- Gotcha! The Government, the Media and the Falklands Crisis (1983)
- The Making of Neil Kinnock (1984)
- Selling Hitler: The Story of the Hitler Diaries
(1986)- Made into a five-part TV series in 1991, broadcast by ITV
- Good and Faithful Servant: The Unauthorized Biography of Bernard Ingham (1990)
Tropes appearing in Robert Harris novels that don't have their own pages
- After the End: The Second Sleep is set some eight centuries after a cataclysmic event in the mid-2020s which wiped out civilisation as we know it; humanity has since entered a new version of The Dung Ages.
- Ambiguous Ending:
- Archangel ends with Rapava's daughter carrying her father's pistol while making her way through the crowd that has assembled at the railway station to greet Young Stalin note .
- V2 ends with Rudi deciding not to accompany von Braun to America, hoping instead to find Kay.
- Fatherland ends with Xavier March drawing his pistol, surrounded by Gestapo officers, while information about the Holocaust may or may not be on its way out of Germany.
- Artistic Licence – History: Enigma was criticised by people who were actually at Bletchley Park during World War II as bearing little resemblance to the real thing. That novel has also been criticised for significantly downplaying the Polish contribution to breaking the German codes.
- As the Good Book Says...: The Puritan characters in Act of Oblivion are fond of quoting from The Bible on a regular basis.
- Christianity is Catholic: At play in Conclave for obvious reasons (what with the whole thing being about the process of electing a new Pope). Averted in The Second Sleep in which the religious authority is clearly stated as being the Church of England, although this version of it does seem to have adopted a few Catholic elements such as an insistence on priests taking a Vow of Celibacy. Thoroughly defied in Act of Oblivion in which just about everyone adheres to some sort of Protestant denomination, although the Puritans tend to regard the Anglicans as being Catholic in all but name, with one of them going so far as to describe the Book of Common Prayer as "the Catholic mass in English".
- Downer Ending: In Pompeii, the titular city is buried as a result of the eruption of Vesuvius, and most of the characters die. In The Second Sleep, most of the characters die when a mudslide engulfs the bunker. Fairfax survives, finds several pre-apocalyptic artefacts and realises what happened to Morgenstern's followers, but he's still trapped in the bunker and will probably die.
- The Everyman: Quite a few of Harris's main characters are this, and not just the men. Notable examples are Hester Wallace in Enigma, Marcus Attilius Primus in Pompeii, Christopher Fairfax in The Second Sleep and Rudi Graf and Kay Caton-Walsh in V2.
- Everyone Has Standards: Richard Nayler in Act of Oblivion is a fervent Royalist who was briefly imprisoned during the time of the Protectorate; he therefore has good reason to hate Oliver Cromwell. Nevertheless, he is disgusted by the order to dig up the man's corpse and have it publicly hanged at Tyburn.
- Foregone Conclusion: Let's face it, in Pompeii, we all know that the volcano is going to erupt, and kill most of the city's inhabitants.
- A lot of the plot of Fatherland is taken up with Xavier March and Charlie Maguire trying to discover what became of the Jews. Any reader already knows what happened - mass extermination on an industrial scale.
- Generation Xerox: In Archangel, Stalin's son looks - and thinks - exactly like his old man.
- The Heretic: A few of them in The Second Sleep, which is set in a medieval-style future in which anyone showing an interest in "scientism" or what happened prior to the unspecified apocalyptic event which sent the world back to The Dung Ages is treated as one of these. One character has even been branded with the letter "H".
- Historical Domain Character: A few. Neville Chamberlain, for example, gets a more-sympathetic-than-usual portrayal in Munich. In the author's note at the start of Act of Oblivion, Harris states that "almost every character is real, apart from Richard Nayler. I suspect there must have been such a person — you cannot sustain a manhunt without a manhunter — but whoever he was, his identity is lost to history."
- Hot for Preacher: Christopher Fairfax, the protagonist of The Second Sleep, is a priest who has more than one female admirer.
- It's Personal: In Act of Oblivion, Richard Nayler is not just motivated by his Royalist fervour (although that plays a part) — he also wants revenge on Edward Whalley and William Goffe because their actions (arresting him for celebrating Christmas at a time when such an act was banned) caused his wife to go into premature labour, leading her to die giving birth to a stillborn baby.
- Living MacGuffin: The MacGuffin in Archangel turns out to be a man ... who is a hitherto-unknown biological son of Josef Stalin. And he's just like his old man.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: The Pope whose death kicks off Conclave bears more than a passing resemblance to Pope Francis.
- Plot-Triggering Death: A couple of examples.
- Conclave is all about the process of electing a new Pope, which has been necessitated by the death of the previous incumbent.
- The only reason why Christopher Fairfax is travelling to the remote village of Addicott St. George at the start of The Second Sleep is because the local vicar, Father Lacy, has died.
- Xavier March is called in to investigate a body dumped in a Berlin lake at the start of Fatherland. Discovering who the body is, and why they were killed, is what kicks off the plot.
- The Reveal: At the start of The Second Sleep, it appears to the reader as though the story is set Medieval England, with the year explicitly stated to be 1468. Then a few anachronisms appear, and it's not long before it is revealed that the novel is actually set several centuries in the future, the world having reverted back to The Dung Ages as the result of an unspecified apocalyptic event that took place in the mid-2020s. In the hardback edition, this reveal — in which the protagonist examines "one of the devices used by the ancients to communicate" (ie. an iPhone) — is on page 23 (of 327), and it was mentioned in most reviews and interviews with the author, so it's hardly spoiler-worthy.
- Ruins for Ruins' Sake: At play in The Second Sleep, in which some twentieth-century structures have survived, but their purpose can no longer be determined. Examples include "The Charwelton Tower", "The Arc, Huddersfield" and "The Stokenchurch Gorge" (that last one's not really a structure, but the effect is the same). On a smaller scale, characters are unable to make head nor tail of Lego bricks, glass panes that appear to have thin pieces of metal embedded in them (in other words, heated windscreens) and test tubes, to say nothing of smartphones that can never be recharged.
- Twist Ending: At play in Conclave, when the newly-elected Pope is revealed to be a woman who has spent her entire adult life living as a man — with the Catholic priesthood providing a convenient cover; the twist-within-the-twist is that the late Pope knew of this, but nevertheless made 'him' a cardinal. Also in The Second Sleep, when it turns out that the Bishop of Exeter knew all about Father Lacy's 'heretical' books, and had actually entrusted them to the guy for safekeeping.
- Vow of Celibacy: In The Second Sleep, the Church of England insists that its priests take one of these, even though everyone seems to be aware that C of E priests were once allowed to marry. That said, Father Lacy is revealed to have, erm, fathered a child with his housekeeper. And over the course of the novel, Fairfax — who seems to attract plenty of female admirers — has sex with Lady Durston, although by that point he has effectively renounced his faith.
