CATHERINE NIXEY is a journalist and a classicist. Her mother was a nun, her father was a monk, and she was brought up Catholic. She studied classics at Cambridge and taught the subject for several years before becoming a journalist on the arts desk at the Times (UK), where she still works. Author of The Darkening Age, which won the Jerwood Award from the Royal Society of Literature, she lives in London with her husband, the journalist and author Tom Whipple, and their two children.