This series of commentaries was described by the Latinist James O'Hara as "one of the most remarkably productive and rich periods of publication of any modern classicist".
Sophie, born Szapiro, came from a Jewish German-Russian background and had fled from Berlin to the United Kingdom in 1939.
[2] In 1971, Horsfall began working as a lecturer at University College London, where he was influenced by the Latinists Otto Skutsch and George Goold.
[2] After his return to the United Kingdom in 2000, Horsfall lived first near Oxford and then in Strathconon, a village in the Scottish Highlands.
[2] Horsfall specialised in the works of the Roman poet Vergil, whose Aeneid was the subject of his University of Oxford doctoral thesis; he published a commentary on Aeneid Book 7 in 2000, followed by Books 11 (2003), 3 (2006), 2 (2008), and 6 (2013) – "one of the most remarkably productive and rich periods of publication of any modern classicist", according to the Latinist James O'Hara, who compared Horsfall to "taxing geniuses in other fields like Ted Williams, Neil Young, or John Ford."