MixedThe Times (UK)The problem with the book is that although it promises history \"through\" women, one look at the footnotes and you will see that pretty much all the source material is written by men ... Fortunately Dunn does try to do more. One nice touch is that she starts each chapter with a few lines of poetry written by a female author that has survived from antiquity ... And it is when the book moves beyond the great women approach, into social history, using the medical, legal, archaeological and visual records, that it becomes more interesting.
Tom Holland
PositiveThe Sunday Times (UK)This is a book for lovers of traditional, grand sweep narrative history with a Boy’s Own flavour. There are descriptions of the army, the origins of the gladiator and the invention of concrete. The limitations of the book mirror the limitations of the material — we don’t have much of a record of a female experience, a slave experience, a Briton on the other side of Hadrian’s Wall, or a vanquished Dacian ... This is not a book for those who seek analysis, interrogation of the material, a shifting of the ways we understand the past, thinking around the implications of this template of empire. Fascinating as the book is, there were times when I longed for an argument.
