John Stuart Hay

John Stuart Hay (27 September 1875 – 26 April 1949) was an English historian and author remembered above all for The Amazing Emperor Heliogabalus (1911), an early full-length modern biography of the Roman emperor Elagabalus. He studied at Oxford and was originally trained for the clergy, but his career soon widened beyond purely religious life.

Hay was also involved in public affairs during a turbulent period in British and Irish history. He is associated with the "Hay Plan," a proposal connected with the Irish Conscription Crisis of 1918, showing that his interests reached well beyond literary and historical writing.

After the First World War, he settled in Athens, Greece, where he worked as an antiquities dealer until his death in 1949. That unusual mix of scholar, political thinker, and dealer in the ancient world gives his books a perspective shaped by both research and firsthand engagement with the past.