Christopher is an author, journalist and founder of The Lake District Book Festival. In a career that has spanned twenty-five years and five continents, he has reported on revolutions and wars and written and broadcast on subjects as diverse as loneliness and religious radicalisation, cockfighting in Afghanistan and euthanasia in the Netherlands.

Building on the success of The Lion House – his acclaimed history of the rise of Suleyman the Magnificent – Christopher published The Golden Throne in March 2025, the second part of his landmark trilogy on the great sultan. His 2023 book Flying Green, published by Columbia Global Reports, explores the decarbonisation of aviation. He is currently researching The Future of Farming, also for Columbia, taking him to Brazil, India and China.

Uniting these threads is his role as a unifier between cultures and peoples, between the present and the past.

In 2024, Christopher founded the Lake District Book Festival which will debut in the village of Cartmel, Cumbria, in June 2026. He is an honorary fellow of the University of St Andrews and will take up a visiting fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, in 2026.