Books like Queens of a Fallen World — picked by fans

A team of experts got together to create this wonderful book. It is well illustrated, clearly written throughout, and firmly based on textual and other evidence. That is, the authors typically start with a general statement such as “There were increased opportunities for women to be educated in the Hellenistic world,” and then go on for a few pages to show how this came about by translating and commenting on the relevant texts, and showing the relevant vase paintings. Ancient Greek history tends to be very male-oriented – almost all ancient Greek writing was done by men, for instance – so this book is a much-needed antidote.

Most Ancient Roman biographies are about men.

This is mainly because there is much less information about Roman women than men. As in many ancient societies, Roman women were not considered equal to men, and did not hold positions of power or authority.

Writing by Roman women themselves is also rare. But modern biographers and historians are attempting to redress the balance. This book is part of the Women in Antiquity series, and tells the life story, as much as can be known, of a formidable woman.

Fulvia was married to and widowed by two powerful Romans before her third marriage to Mark Antony. She was a huge influence on him, and a power in Rome in her own right, wielding authority in Antony’s name, even when he was in the east, gallivanting with Cleopatra.

Another vital source for my Mark Antony series, this book is a great read about… show more.

This is my favorite of McCullough’s Masters of Rome series. Though fictional, they are impeccably researched, rendering the collapse of the Republic in truly astonishing detail. McCullough manages to render the twists and turns of Roman politics in a way that a reader can not only follow them, but understand why they mattered so much. You’ll feel as though you are right there in the Forum or the dining-room with Caesar, Antony, Pompey, Servilia, Fulvia, and the rest. McCullough’s vivid prose drives home that these were real people, living real lives, with the same petty concerns and daily frustrations as all of us, even when they were also shaping the fates of nations.

I like historical novels with strong female characters, even unsympathetic ones (maybe especially unsympathetic ones), but if I am not going to throw the book against the wall, their lives and values need to be true to those of their time.

The Maria of the title is one of the best examples I know of a slightly difficult and strong-minded woman who is fully a product of her world, in this case, the world of Norman adventurers of the eleventh century who carved out domains for themselves in southern Italy against opposition from Muslims and the pope in Rome.

Her life is constrained by the expectations of her class and gender and a marriage she does not want, but she is a survivor, and she finds her own way to exert power.

I’ve always seen Muriel Spark as a kindred spirit, and her experience of Rome as mirroring my own, albeit on a more luxurious scale (although I did once live round the corner from her flat near Piazza Farnese).

Of the novels she set in Italy, my favourite is probably The Public Image, a story of revenge and dissimulation that captures the dark heart of the city at a time when it was known as Hollywood on the Tiber. It’s a wonderful portrait of what lay beneath the dolce vita and also, presciently, has a lot to say about celebrity culture and its manufacture. Listen up, influencers!

I discovered Bernhard—miraculously—in a provincial train station in southern Italy, where the bar had a selection of books on sale.

This was when Bernhard translations into English were hard to find, so my early experience of the writer, in my opinion one of the most extraordinary of his generation, was in Italian. His final novel, Extinction, is set in Rome and it’s a classic of Bernhardian nihilism, scratching at the itch of the absurdity that is life in the face of death.

Bernhard’s Rome is the yin of intellectual freedom to the suffocating and hypocritical yang of Austria. In the end, what I love most about this book is probably its exhilarating contempt for mediocrity and its capacity, I’ll admit it, to make me laugh out loud at just how awful life really is.

Adrienne Mayor, a historian of ancient science and folklorist at Princeton University, looks at classical myths that ultimately owe their inspiration to fossils found and interpreted by the Greeks and Romans.

Stories of Giants and Monsters grew up around the giant and mysterious fossil bones that resembled nothing they knew. In particular, she relates the image and stories of griffins to ceratopsian fossils, like those of Protoceratops and Psitticasaurus.

She also shows how dwarf elephant fossils may have inspired the myth of the Cyclops. An excellent read.

Pasolini’s films, Mamma Roma and Accattone, were among the reasons I decided to move to Rome in the first place.

Their blend of poetry and wretchedness chimed with my own vision of life at that time and I seized the chance to improve my knowledge of the city, of Italian and of Roman dialect, by reading his first novel Ragazzi di Vita, as soon as I arrived in the city.

Ragazzi di vita are hustlers, doomed from birth by circumstances outside their control, and I was drawn to the novel’s dark non-conformist romanticism, its refusal to compromise and the sheer texture of the language, which I only partly understood. It’s like Kerouac, but for real.

I'm loving this novel by Liam Callanan.

It poses questions I feel close to and presents turns of life I have been surprised by myself, if in a different way. The writing is richly textured and so very delicate.

"...She'd known quiet, of course... But not silence, not like this. This silence had texture and shape; it felt attached to each molecule of air. Everything inside her was falling silent, too."

Claire, 52 and a real estate broker, deeply desires a fresh start. She receives a call from a convent in Rome that is facing its end. When she arrives she meets a colorful, fierce group of nuns living in a crumbling villa and starts wondering if she should stay forever.

I really think this book has also been underappreciated and overlooked by students and enthusiasts.

It contains a remarkable (and again) unsurpassed collection of written sources from the Iron Age in regard to the history, culture, and religions of the Celtic speaking peoples of ancient Europe. In some places it focuses on interactions between the Celts and population groups from the Mediterranean and other parts of ancient Europe.

But it also goes into a great deal of detail about the Celts themselves; where they lived; the names and activities of many of their leaders, warriors, druids, and others; and fascinating information about their cultures, beliefs, and religions... in accurate historical context which makes for a very engaging - and at times a surprising read.

Without a proper understanding of the historical realities, and the context from which information derives... whether Greek and Roman accounts, inscriptions, other written sources, archeology, and… show more.