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I’m a British academic historian of the Roman Empire. I became interested in Rome before I could read, but since no school I attended offered Classics, I had to pick the subject up by myself. I first read historical fiction, and it was not until I was about fourteen that a close friend recommended Grant’s translation of Tacitus’ Annals. Thanks to a paper round, I could afford five shillings to buy the copy I still use, which swept me away. A great strength of Roman history is that it gives the opportunity to attempt a dispassionate—in Tacitus’ words, ‘without strong emotion or partiality’— understanding of a familiar but very different society.
Although I had become interested in Roman history at a very early age, this was the first full ancient text that, at about fourteen years old, I read about the Roman emperors. I was immediately taken by Tacitus’ serious tone and the immediacy of his narrative.
His near-contemporary account of (at least part of) the reigns of Tiberius, Claudius, and Nero sounded, for all that it was written almost two thousand years before, very modern. After reading it, I bought as many of the (purple) Latin and (brown) Greek Penguin translations of classical literature–history, poetry, and drama–as were available.
His last work, regarded by many as the greatest work of contemporary scholarship, Tacitus' The Annals of Imperial Rome recount with depth and insight the history of the Roman Empire during the first century A.D. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with an introduction by Michael Grant.
Tacitus' Annals of Imperial Rome recount the major historical events from the years shortly before the death of Augustus up to the death of Nero in AD 68. With clarity and vivid intensity he describes the reign of terror under the corrupt Tiberius, the great fire of Rome during the time of Nero,…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
Writing this biography was an extraordinary experience for me. I have been writing about the arts for more than forty years. Over the decades I was Associate Editor of Ballet Review and dance critic for The New York Sun. Talking to Alla Osipenko provided singular insight into the culture and politics of the Soviet Union, as well as the individual artistry and psychology of this great ballerina. I left every interview with her feeling elated. By the time my biography was published in 2015, I also knew/met/had interviewed many of the people she described and could write from some degree of first-hand knowledge.
I think it was the first biography I ever purchased. At age ten or eleven, I read in it, but now I’m reading it all the way through, and I’m pleased to say that even at that tender age, I gravitated to the best!
Fraser stops the narrative when she wants to discourse upon a particular issue or attribute and always considers her own take on events and characters worthy of elegant interjection.
She’s not afraid to discuss relevant but not strictly solemn issues, such as whether Mary was considered beautiful and the tragic queen’s love of dancing and cross-dressing.
“A book that will leave few readers unmoved.”–San Francisco Chronicle
She was the quintessential queen: statuesque, regal, dazzlingly beautiful. Her royal birth gave her claim to the thrones of two nations; her marriage to the young French dauphin promised to place a third glorious crown on her noble head.
Instead, Mary Stuart became the victim of her own impulsive heart, scandalizing her world with a foolish passion that would lead to abduction, rape and even murder. Betrayed by those she most trusted, she would be lured into a deadly game of power, only to lose to her envious and unforgiving…
Writing this biography was an extraordinary experience for me. I have been writing about the arts for more than forty years. Over the decades I was Associate Editor of Ballet Review and dance critic for The New York Sun. Talking to Alla Osipenko provided singular insight into the culture and politics of the Soviet Union, as well as the individual artistry and psychology of this great ballerina. I left every interview with her feeling elated. By the time my biography was published in 2015, I also knew/met/had interviewed many of the people she described and could write from some degree of first-hand knowledge.
Behrman emerged in the 1920s as one of America’s most original playwrights, peopling his drawing-room comedies with a cross-section of archetypal American cultural and political viewpoints.
In 1960’s Portrait of Max, he bends genres, combining biography and personal memoir as he recounts his friendship with Max Beerbohm, master drama critic and humorist, who was then living in retirement in Italy.
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
Writing this biography was an extraordinary experience for me. I have been writing about the arts for more than forty years. Over the decades I was Associate Editor of Ballet Review and dance critic for The New York Sun. Talking to Alla Osipenko provided singular insight into the culture and politics of the Soviet Union, as well as the individual artistry and psychology of this great ballerina. I left every interview with her feeling elated. By the time my biography was published in 2015, I also knew/met/had interviewed many of the people she described and could write from some degree of first-hand knowledge.
It's not strictly a biography, but it might as well be one. A brilliant stylist, Breslin creates a fictionalized dramatization that has the unerring ring of Runyon’s truth.
His chronicling of the raffish world of Broadway and adjacent side streets was the basis for the musical Guys and Dolls. Breslin uses copious dialogue and minutely observed incidents to flesh out things that happened or may very well have happened.
Immortalizes Damon Runyon in a biography of the Roaring Twenties journalist who covered the Mexican Revolution, World War I, the Lindbergh kidnapping, sports and theater
Writing this biography was an extraordinary experience for me. I have been writing about the arts for more than forty years. Over the decades I was Associate Editor of Ballet Review and dance critic for The New York Sun. Talking to Alla Osipenko provided singular insight into the culture and politics of the Soviet Union, as well as the individual artistry and psychology of this great ballerina. I left every interview with her feeling elated. By the time my biography was published in 2015, I also knew/met/had interviewed many of the people she described and could write from some degree of first-hand knowledge.
Biographers customarily make some psychological observations, but Dr. Kaplan, both author and practicing psychiatrist, had the training and the daring to go further. A suicide at seventeen, Chatterton’s presentation of his own poetry as the creation of an invented 15th-century monk proved his undoing.
Freud’s theory of adolescent development and “Family Romances” guides Dr. Kaplan as she ties the universal patterns of adolescence to Chatterton’s individual needs and drives, analyzing what led him to recklessly defraud the literary public.
The enigma of Thomas Chatterton is investigated by Louise J. Kaplan, who untangles the counterfeiter from the artist, the troubled adolescent from the visionary poet, as she recreates the short life of a fatherless boy who found an authentic voice only in the realm of his imaginings.
I’m a British academic historian of the Roman Empire. I became interested in Rome before I could read, but since no school I attended offered Classics, I had to pick the subject up by myself. I first read historical fiction, and it was not until I was about fourteen that a close friend recommended Grant’s translation of Tacitus’ Annals. Thanks to a paper round, I could afford five shillings to buy the copy I still use, which swept me away. A great strength of Roman history is that it gives the opportunity to attempt a dispassionate—in Tacitus’ words, ‘without strong emotion or partiality’— understanding of a familiar but very different society.
Because I was not a Classicist when I went to university, I spent the first two years of my three-year BA course reading Medieval and Modern, not Ancient, History when I went to university. One part of the syllabus was Tudor England, and a key personality was Thomas Cromwell, chief minister of Henry VIII.
Elton’s book was the main recommended modern study. I was wholly convinced by his revisionist interpretation of Cromwell: not a villain but the honest servant of a tyrannical monarch. The book made me see that to be interesting pre-modern history depends very much on a readiness to be imaginative in the interpretation of the usually scanty sources.
In this respect, significantly, Elton’s book became the (not always appreciated) basis of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy.
This book is a study of change in the methods and principles of English government in the sixteenth century, from the 'household' methods of the Middle Ages to the bureaucratic organization of a national monarchy. The most important decade, 1530-40, is given most concentrated attention, but the earlier and later phases are also touched upon. The study deals with the organs of central government: the financial machinery and the new courts; seals and secretariats and the rise of the secretary of state; the council and the making of the privy council; the royal household and its retirement from national government.…
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
I’m a British academic historian of the Roman Empire. I became interested in Rome before I could read, but since no school I attended offered Classics, I had to pick the subject up by myself. I first read historical fiction, and it was not until I was about fourteen that a close friend recommended Grant’s translation of Tacitus’ Annals. Thanks to a paper round, I could afford five shillings to buy the copy I still use, which swept me away. A great strength of Roman history is that it gives the opportunity to attempt a dispassionate—in Tacitus’ words, ‘without strong emotion or partiality’— understanding of a familiar but very different society.
Laslett’s book taught me the value of comparative material in studying Ancient History. Another part of the Medieval and Modern History syllabus was seventeenth-century England. Teaching was dominated by the Civil War, emphasizing its socio-economic aspects.
This book had just appeared, and I drew on it enthusiastically for my essays. It dealt with the only period of English pre-industrial history for which original documentation allows some meaningful, detailed study of ordinary life. This is not possible for Roman history, even through archaeology, but the experience of later times can be considered in studying Roman society.
For example, Laslett explored precisely how upper-class and merchant families were not nuclear but made up of a large number of near and distant relatives, servants, employees and apprentices: not unlike the traditional Roman familia, except that the latter included slaves.
What was life like in England before the Industrial Revolution? The World We Have Lost is widely regarded as a classic of historical writing and a vital book in reshaping our understanding of the past and the structure of family life in England.
Turning away from the prevailing fixation of history on a grand scale, Laslett instead asks some simple yet fundamental questions about England before the Industrial Revolution: How long did people live? How did they treat their children? Did they get enough to eat? What were the levels of literacy? His findings overturned much received wisdom: girls did…
I’m a British academic historian of the Roman Empire. I became interested in Rome before I could read, but since no school I attended offered Classics, I had to pick the subject up by myself. I first read historical fiction, and it was not until I was about fourteen that a close friend recommended Grant’s translation of Tacitus’ Annals. Thanks to a paper round, I could afford five shillings to buy the copy I still use, which swept me away. A great strength of Roman history is that it gives the opportunity to attempt a dispassionate—in Tacitus’ words, ‘without strong emotion or partiality’— understanding of a familiar but very different society.
When I was finally allowed to specialize in Ancient History in the third year of my BA degree, this included a survey of Ancient Greece, supervised by no less a figure than Professor (later Sir) Moses Finley.
One of his recommendations for reading was Adkins' book, listed here, a key point of which is that virtue is not absolute but depends on a society's socio-economic development level. In Archaic Greece, the "good" man was not the one whom later Greeks, and ourselves, would call "good" by virtue of moral rectitude but the one who could, by brute force if necessary, protect his family and community in troubled times: a telling corrective to historical "presentism."
For the past two decades, I have written about the intersection of people and place, particularly as viewed through the lens of geology and how it influences our lives. My nine books include Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography, Cairns: Messengers in Stone, and Homewaters: A Human and Natural History of Puget Sound. All of them have a goal of helping people develop a better connection with the natural world around them.
Barry Lopez and his 40 plus contributors dive deep into the language of the land, providing colorful, literary, and sometimes opinionated definitions for more than 850 landscape terms, many of which owe their existence to geology, such as ‘a’a, erg, slickrock, and yardang. The book is an essential and timely contribution to the myriad ways that geology affects not only place but language as well. This is a book for anyone who wants to learn more about America, the nature of its landscape, and its history, and to develop a better connection to place. Or for anyone who wants to use correctly such fine terms as chickenhead, nubble, boondocks, and thank-you ma’am.
Hailed by book reviewers as a "masterpiece," "gorgeous and fascinating," and "sheer pleasure," Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape was published in fall 2006 in hardcover. It was met with outstanding reviews and strong sales, going into three printings. A language-lover's dream, this visionary reference revitalized a descriptive language for the American landscape by combining geography, literature, and folklore in one volume. This is a totally redesigned, near-pocket-sized field guide edition of the best-selling hardcover. Home Ground brings together 45 poets and writers to create more than 850 original definitions for words that describe our lands and waters. The…
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
I made my first visit to Pompeii at age seven. That day, I told my parents that I had been there before. It was all very familiar. And that sense of déjà vu has never left me. I feel it whenever I go back to Pompeii, Herculaneum, and the Roman Forum. I don’t believe in reincarnation, but... As an adult, I’ve returned many times to those places and visited others featured in my books: the Etruscan necropolis at Caere, which was already 1,000 years old at the time of my novels; Athens; and the ancient ports of Piraeus in Greece and Itanos in Crete. I earned a Ph.D. at Northwestern University, taught for many years, and enjoyed a million marvelous experiences, but my lifelong love of ancient Rome is the direct result of that long-ago visit to Pompeii with my parents.
A large part of the last book of my trilogy focuses on one character’s involvement in the construction of the Flavian Amphitheater, known today as The Colosseum. As with other complex issues I’ve written about — the Jewish Revolt, social constraints on women, relationships between masters and slaves — I’ve had to make sense of this grandest construction project of the first century. Elkins’ scholarly book helped me get out of the “tourist-in-Rome mindset” and into the “you-are-there-as-it’s-being-built mindset.” I’m currently writing that section, so the jury is still out, but Elkins’ in-depth research and clear exposition provide a good road map.
Go behind the scenes to discover why the Colosseum was the king of amphitheaters in the Roman world-a paragon of Roman engineering prowess.
Early one morning in 80 CE, the Colosseum roared to life with the deafening cheers of tens of thousands of spectators as the emperor, Titus, inaugurated the new amphitheater with one hundred days of bloody spectacles. These games were much anticipated, for the new amphitheater had been under construction for a decade. Home to spectacles involving exotic beasts, elaborate executions of criminals, gladiatorial combats, and even-when flooded-small-scale naval battles, the building itself was also a marvel. Rising…
