PositiveThe GuardianAddis’s chosen formula is to serve up selected highlights, mostly the expected ones...but to come at them from quirky angles ... The hammed-up tone works to draw the reader in ... Addis casts a keen eye over not just the big figures of history but also its crowds, mess and detritus. His focus is as much on the sordid underbelly of urban life as it is on Rome the sublime caput mundi ... Addis doesn’t shy away from baroque descriptions of death and decay ... The art appreciation isn’t always subtle ... Addis’s remarks on La Dolce Vita might be taken as an unkind caricature of his own book: \'its endless cameos, its episodic structure, its capering progress of characters with nowhere to go.\' But that would be unfair. An end-to end reading throws up many instructive continuities ... Thanks to his enthusiasm, Addis succeeds in keeping his reader afloat. He relishes the highs and lows of Rome’s past in his purplest passages while pricking the bubbles of other people’s poetic license.
Peter Stothard
RaveThe GuardianStothard’s artful blend of truth and fiction is the right device, as it was once for Tacitus and Seneca, to nail the absurdity of those times ... the parallels with Nero, however imperfect, are there to see: the solipsism, the numbness to advice, the inability to yield power gracefully ... Stothard’s poetically written, supremely stylish memoir only partly conceals its underlying mission, to insist that antiquity still has urgent things to tell us.
