Short answers, pulled from the story.
Tacitus was born around 56 or 57 AD and died sometime after 116 AD, possibly as late as 125 or 130. He outlived his friend Pliny the Younger, who died around 113, and the Emperor Trajan, who died in 117.
Five works by Tacitus survive: the Agricola (98 AD), the Germania (98 AD), the Dialogus de oratoribus (c. 102), the Histories (c. 105), and the Annals (c. 117). The Annals and Histories together were designed as a single thirty-book narrative covering the Roman Empire from 14 AD to 96 AD.
Tacitus's experience under the Emperor Domitian, whose reign from 81 to 96 AD he described as a reign of terror, left him jaded and, by his own admission, ashamed of his complicity. He wrote in the Agricola that he and his fellow senators had been forced to watch and participate in acts of tyranny. This experience instilled in him a hatred of tyranny that runs through all his historical writing.
Tacitus began as a quaestor in 81 or 82 AD under Titus, became praetor in 88, served as suffect consul in 97 under Nerva, and held the governorship of the Roman province of Asia between 112 and 113, the highest civilian post in the imperial administration.
The first half of the Annals survived through a single manuscript from Corvey Abbey in Germany, and the second half through a single manuscript from Monte Cassino in Italy. Much of the Histories and portions of the Annals are lost. The Augustan History claims that Emperor Marcus Claudius Tacitus, who reigned in 275-276, arranged for his works to be preserved, but scholars consider this account unreliable.
Tacitus mentions Jesus of Nazareth in the Annals, in connection with Nero's persecution of Christians. The Annals is considered one of the earliest surviving secular historical writings to include this reference.