Andrew Caldecott was seized by the notion of a city-state hiding a cataclysmic secret while studying history at New College Oxford. After graduating, he went on to become one of the country's top QCs specialising in media, defamation and libel law. He represented the BBC in the Hutton Inquiry (into the death of biological warfare expert and UN weapons inspector David Kelly), the Guardian in the Leveson Inquiry (into the British press following the phone-hacking scandal), and supermodel Naomi Campbell in her landmark privacy case, among many others. This hasn't left him much time for writing, but the rich, layered world of Rotherweird has been nagging in the background of his mind for many years, and has at last burst into blossom, at once of-the-moment, historic and timeless.
