The past is never dead, it isn’t even past
Legion at the British Museum When one imagines the Roman Empire, as so many do as we recently learnt, the sheer scale implies some kind of chaotic organisation. With the boundaries stretching from Scotland to Libya, and from Portugal to the Caspian Sea, the...
Vesuvius in the Age of Revolution Volcanic is the first and only book I have written not focused on Britain, the only one that concerns the history of science, and the only one centred on Italy. So why the departure, the urge to explore something new? Restlessness...
Marcus Licinius Crassus was famous for a boast. No one should be considered rich, said the richest Roman of his time, unless he could finance an army from his own income. Twice he lived up to that boast, the first time against Spartacus gaining himself only...
Fiona Forsyth, you have moved on from the Lucius Sestius mysteries to a new series. How does it feel to say goodbye to characters like Lucius? When the story demands a certain resolution then it is easy to say goodbye. I’m not going to say I cried when killing off...
Alistair, congratulations on your third book, Warrior. Since we last spoke, our heroes, Lucius Faenis Felix and Cai Martis, have travelled to Hispania and Felix’s homeland from the Northern Britannia of Hunt. What sort of man is Felix? Well firstly, thanks for having...
Books of 2023 from Aspects of HistoryAlan Bardos Author of The Dardanelles ConspiracyMy book of the year is SAS Forged in Hell. The next instalment of Damien Lewis’ WW II odyssey with the men of 1 SAS, as they become the ‘tip of the spear’ in the invasion of Sicily...
Cleopatra Selene, the daughter of Cleopatra VII, Queen of Egypt, and Marcus Antonius (known as Mark Antony), Roman consul and triumvir, was born in 40 BCE. This made her around ten years old when the civil war between her father and his fellow triumvir Gaius Julius...
Blood and Poison is the brand-new instalment of the critically acclaimed Spies of Rome series - the last hurrah for Rufus Varro In this final farewell to Foreman’s secret agent of antiquity, we follow Varro as he is called upon once more to protect Augustus’ Empire...
Khaled al–Asaad “In spite of my advanced age,” wrote the French historian Paul Veyne in 2015, “it is my duty as a former professor and as a human being to voice my stupefaction before this incomprehensible destruction, and to sketch a portrait of the past splendour of...
Plutarch observed that the “many virtues” of the Roman general and triumvir Marcus Licinius Crassus “were obscured by one vice, avarice.” Peter Stothard’s life of Crassus is the story of that vice. The book opens by laying bare the contradiction at the heart of the...
