Hello, I’m Remus, and I come from Southeast London. I hated school, it was a failing, under-resourced, underfunded inner London comprehensive school that did bugger all for dyslexic kids like me, and was an intellectual vacuum, and I’ll leave it at that. After leaving school, I trained as a photographer, and by the time I was 19, I had my own business in London and carried out commercial photography for advertising media and diversified into cinematography and in the later years of my career before I became differently abled, I worked in the entertainments industry directing and filming music videos; it was all great fun and I met lots of interesting people and went to interesting locations. I moved to France and lived there for a few years, a perfect base from where I could take off in my car to travel throughout Europe, exploring archaeological sites and the concentration camp memorials of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and Dachau in Germany, as well as the Bundesarchiv to research for my Chameleon novels, that I write under my other penname “Chris Black”, but my true vocation in life is, and has always been writing. I’ve always had a passion for creative writing ever since I was about 8 years old. A strange passion for a guy with dyslexia.

I love history and I love writing stories, so I combine the two to create stories within strictly historically factual settings hoping to be both informative for the reader as well as entertaining for them. My historical books are serious works, because history is a serious subject, and a wonderful teacher.

I write under two names, Philip Remus and Chris Black. Under Philip Remus, I exclusively write historical novels based in the ancient world, mainly Greek city states, especially Sparta. I also write novels based in Ancient Rome.  Under my Cris Black penname, I write science-fiction and my historical “Chameleon” thrillers based in Nazi Germany and Europe.

Due to a spinal injury, I had to quit my career in photography and videography. But adversity is there to overcome they say, and my spinal problems actually turned out to be the perfect opportunity to follow my love of writing, although it’s not really like going to work, once my word processor is on, I’m off in my temporal time machine.

My other interests are conservation natural environment when it comes to human encroachment and global warming. I see a very grim future for planet Earth, as might be gathered in some of my sci-fi.

I’ve an eclectic taste in music: fast loud high energy club music, classical, opera and I enjoy the ballet and certain operas as much as a good night out in West End nightclubs.

I like reading, even if it is a bit like an SAS assault course for my dyslexic wiring, and perhaps because of it, I enjoy reading classics such as E M Forster, Jean Genet, E A Poe, Thomas and Klause Mann and ancient literature of Virgil, Euripides, Plato, Cicero and others. Modern American classics from Thomas Harris, John Grisham, Philip K Dick and Stephen King who’s novel “The Stand” along with the recent NASA OSIRIS-REx mission inspired me to write my last dystopian sci-fi book “Dead Blood” Chris Black.

Among my dislikes are politicians of all colours, stripes and creeds, social media,

Well, that’s it in a nutshell really.