Book Reviews

It feels slightly ironic to be writing a review of a book that is essentially a collection of reviews. As Classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, Mary Beard draws on the wealth of material at her disposal to give her readers a snapshot...

Guy de la Bédoyère brings Roman Britain to life through a quite brilliant study of many individuals who escape the overall narrative of historians, but leave glimpses into their lives through traces of the archaeological record. He works...

Mathematics in Ancient Egypt traces the development of Egyptian mathematics, from the end of the 4th millennium BC to the end of the Pharaonic Period in Greco-Roman times. Imhausen uses mathematical texts that have been discovered, documents...

We know the big names - Cicero, Diodorus, Caesar, Livy - but we forget how periods in Rome's history were recorded by multiple people, mostly at the same time. Many times history books were a not just a narrative but a composed book of first-hand...

Patricia Southern's writing breathes wit and entertainment into her treatment of Hadrian's Wall. Hadrian's Wall: Everyday Life on a Roman Frontier could easily have been yet another dry interpretation of the archaeological and historical...

Blood of the Celts: The New Ancestry Story, by Jean Manco, a building historian and the author of Ancestral Journeys: The Peopling of Europe from the First Ventures to the Vikings, traces the complex story of the Celtic peoples through history...

China: A History Volume I - From Neolthic Cultures through the Great Qing Empire by Harold M. Tanner is very clear history of China from prehistoric times to 1799 CE. I have not found that there is a Volume II available but, when or if it...

Caligula. Gladiator. Spartacus. HBO's series Rome. If you've seen any on-screen adaptation of life in the Roman Empire, you've seen some depiction of gossip worthy or taboo sex. Cleopatra seduced Caesar; Caligula held infamous orgies; Nero...