Diana Tritton has a degree in English from the University of California and was a senior advertising copywriter. She has spent many years researching the people and places all over Europe mentioned in the text and paints an intimate and graphic picture of people, locations - often exotic - and history. She has deeply researched the aftermath of the First World War on the Macedonian Front, the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Imperial family, and on the role of her principal character, Lieutenant-Colonel Edward Lisle Strutt, whose Diary forms the basis of the narrative.