After studying Classics at Magdalen College, Oxford and practicing as an international lawyer in London and Dubai, he worked as a teacher, journalist, freelance writer and theatre director in various countries before concluding that he was unemployable outside academia and returning to the United Kingdom to complete a PhD at the University of St. Andrews, on Art as a counterforce to Nihilism in the works of Oscar Wilde. His research interests include the Victorian religious unsettlement, the Aesthetic Movement, and the reception of Greek and Latin literature in nineteenth-century Europe.