RaveThe Times (UK)One of Beard’s strengths comes from her desire to use archaeology to support or debunk the fantastical claims of Rome’s writers ... Trademark exuberant Beard style. Those familiar with her TV series can hear her voice in the way she writes, her passion for the subject oozing off the page. She is an engaging writer and a valuable enthusiast for the classics. It is a pity, though, how often she feels the need to remind us how problematic the Romans are for today’s hypersensitive audience ... That is a small quibble.
Paul Cartledge
PositiveThe Times (UK)After a slightly pedestrian introduction—it read better a second time as a summing-up after finishing the book—and the lack of a Theban Thucydides to put meat on the bones of their decades on the naughty step, Cartledge’s narrative comes to life as the city of Thebes flourishes. The story of their rise and fall in the second half of the book is told as vividly as he relates their myths in the enjoyable second chapter. Alas, for Thebes, glory was all too fleeting.
Daisy Dunn
PositiveThe Times (UK)The book really should be called In the Shadow of My Uncle...since the younger Pliny, a lawyer, frustrated poet and writer of hundreds of letters, emerges as a bit of a bore. Dunn knits their lives together well and analyses the influence that they would have later on scholars from the Italian Renaissance to the English Romantic poets, but the finger flicks more speedily through the pages when her focus is on the younger one.
Ferdinand Addis
PositiveThe Times... superb ... Rome’s history is written in blood and Addis, who has a vivid, pacey writing style, spares not the squeamish as he describes three millennia of violence, from the first kings to Il Duce ... In 600 pages we get plenty of entertaining stories ... Far from being Augustine’s City of God, Rome has more often been a city of, as Addis writes, \'humans trying, and often failing, to live in history,\' yet it holds a powerful spell.
Ben Schott
MixedThe Times UKThe name’s Wooster, Bertram Wilberforce Wooster, licensed to swill and to lob bread rolls at any passing booby. And, in this new homage to PG Wodehouse by Ben Schott (of miscellanies fame) the latest recruit to the British Secret Service ... Quibbles? Well maybe some of the early dialogue paints Wooster as a bit more intelligent than he should be, barely a quarter-ass rather than the mentally negligible hero of yore, but let’s put that down to Jeeves slipping an extra kipper on to his breakfast plate. And it is a pity that Gussie Fink-Nottle doesn’t make an appearance. These are trifles, though. On reading this work, the Wodehouse estate must surely be left purring, as Bertie would to Jeeves with the talents that famously won him a prize for scripture knowledge: \'Well done, good and faithful servant.\'
