I was born in Bristol in 1969, and brought up in many places. I grew up mainly in Amsterdam and then moved back to England to be

educated, at York and Oxford. My historical interests were likewise never fixed - at first I was fascinated by the political history of the early twentieth century, then by the religious and social history of medieval peasants. My current work is the outcome of a series of happy accidents.

I initially embarked on the research that led to The Origins of Sex out of sheer curiosity about the sexual mores of men and women in the past, and why they had changed so much and so suddenly in the eighteenth century. I thought it would be a brief project, but the more I pursued it the bigger the subject revealed itself to be. And the more amazing material I uncovered in archives, libraries, and art galleries around the world, the more determined I became to do justice to what turned out to be one of the great untold stories about the origins of our modern condition.

Writing big books takes time and congenial intellectual surroundings, and I have been extremely lucky to have these. Ian Kershaw, the brilliant biographer of Hitler, gave me my first job, at the University of Sheffield, and since 1996 I have taught at Oxford, first at All Souls College and latterly at Exeter College. My next book will be a global history of English and its uses since the middle ages.