He is the most powerful ruler ever – and his first biographer was crucified. What drew Edmund Richardson, winner of the £50,000 Baillie Gifford prize, to his short tumultuous life?
He was the most powerful man in the world but he was brought down by one battle too many after a decade at the top. The story of Alexander the Great might be more than 2,000 years old, but it seems timely that a new biography of the ancient ruler won the Baillie Gifford prize for nonfiction just as President Trump took a battering in the US midterms. “This is a moment,” says its author Edmund Richardson, “where people are finding that there are limits to what unlimited wealth and power can do, and that humanity catches up with you, whether you like it or not. Alexander wants to transform the world – and he leaves it in ruins.”
Wearing a purple velvet jacket, purple scarf and matching socks, with a high forehead and corona of auburn curls, Richardson himself might have stepped out of an earlier age. It is hard to imagine anyone less like history’s favourite mob boss than this softly spoken professor of classics. We are having coffee at the offices of the PR company for the Baillie Gifford prize, the view of the City of London skyline from the floor to ceiling windows a reminder of 21st-century power and economics.