Which Roman historian wrote the Annals covering Tiberius to Nero?

Tacitus, and he is the main reason we think of those emperors as we do - much of the popular image of Tiberius on Capri, of Nero and the fire, comes through him. He wrote about a century after the events, from records and testimony, with a style so compressed and cutting that Latin students find him harder than Cicero.

He is also not neutral and does not pretend to be. He was a senator writing about the destruction of senatorial independence, and his subject is what autocracy does to the people who have to live under it - the flattery, the informers, the way that speaking freely becomes impossible and then unthinkable. His line about a false peace, that they make a desert and call it peace, is put in the mouth of a British chieftain resisting Rome, which is a striking thing for a Roman senator to write.

One paragraph of his has had an enormous afterlife. In describing Nero blaming the fire on Christians, Tacitus refers to Christus, executed under Pontius Pilate - which is among the earliest non-Christian references to Jesus as a historical person and gets cited constantly in arguments about the historical record. The Annals survive incompletely, in two medieval manuscripts, with substantial sections simply gone.