My selection from the new list from Oxford. The first is an original work, and the rest are translations. They are all less than £20.   more »

Although their writing styles are chalk and cheese, I love both authors. I like Davis' knowing anachronisms and her hero's all too transparent attempts to hide his decent and, let's face it, softie self under macho talk. From Saylor I expect, and get, the feeling that I really know people like Sulla, Catiline and Cicero.   more »

It is interesting to compare this review with the clutch of American reviews that I read last year.   more »

OUP has published a collection of essays on Seneca. Also there is an independently produced GCSE Latin Resource Book.   more »

After defeating the last queen of Egypt, Julius Caesar's adopted son was determined to destroy her reputation. He smashed the images made to glorify her and ensured his pocket historians cast her as a greedy, incestuous, adulterous whore who used her foreign, feminine wiles to emasculate the Roman Empire.   more »

The IndyStar reviews a book that inhabits Caroline Lawrence territory.   more »

Now it's in paperback for £25 which is reasonable for 682 pages.   more »

Dr Nick Summerton, GP and advisor to the National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) has written a book "Medicine and Health in Roman Britain".   more »

...is already being seen by many as the definitive account of the fate of Judaism in the Roman Empire.   more »

Caius Julius Caesar, the epileptic son of an undistinguished patrician family, shook Europe to its core and shaped humanity’s future for at least two millennia.   more »

"For the past 200 years the real story of this ancient town, destroyed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, has been kept from public view."   more »

Links to recent popular books on the Classics can be found here   more »

It's just a resume of a review of a book, but includes:   more »

Another review of Carpe Diem and Ad Infinitum is here.   more »

It's a good review, but I suddenly thought on reaching this, near the end, that it would be impossible to turn these abstract sentences into convincing Ciceronian (or even Tacitean) prose. I shall be happy to publish any Latin version that proves me wrong!   more »

The Latin language is a little like a Russian vine. No matter how hard it is pruned, it has a habit of springing back again. Even though it is now a sorry thing compared with the great and branching plant it once was, it is still irrepressibly putting out shoots   more »

McCullough, simply through the power of story and factual acuteness, shows that previous representations of Antony and Cleopatra are open to review. Surprisingly McCullough says that she was not initially excited by the prospect of writing about this "pair of failures" as she describes the lovers.   more »

In "Ad Infinitum," he has produced a book that's often informative and fascinating, sometimes wearyingly discursive and, occasionally, just plain frustrating.   more »

The result is a triumph, a must for everyone interested in the most famous site in the ancient world. Beautifully written and magnificently illustrated, packed with fascinating information, it takes the reader from the explosion and history of the excavations back to the birth of the town, its subsequent history and what the remains now tell us.   more »

The flavour of Tom Holland's review of Mary Beard's The Roman Triumph can be judged from these excerpts:   more »

Nicholas Ostler's Ad Infinitum is the story of Latin, and like the story of language itself, it's really the story of people - what they did, what they dreamed, how they lived and died. It's told as well as any novel and is as gripping.   more »

There's a new paperback collection of criticism of Catullus published between 1950 and 2000 from OUP   more »

Mary Beard in the Guardian reviews Charlotte Higgins' Latin Love Lessons   more »

Emily Wilson’s book The Death of Socrates is the latest in Profile’s series reassessing historical moments   more »

"long on workmanlike scholarship but short on revelation"   more »

There's a long excerpt from Are We Rome? by Cullen Murphy,   more »

And now we have the bestselling Percy Jackson stories by the American author Rick Riordan, of which this is the third. Percy is Perseus, a demi-god or "half-blood": his father is Poseidon, god of the sea, and his mother a mere mortal. His ballpoint pen becomes his trusty sword, his watch his shield. He's a 21st-century teenage hero.   more »

Jerusalem's fall, and the consequent loss of status of Jews in the Roman Empire, was mostly sheer bad luck.   more »

One person who's spent time looking at the Roman people with wonder and sympathy - and endless fascination - is author Simon Young.   more »

A review article in the Times Literary Supplement discusses the art of translating poetry with particular reference to Ted Hughes.   more »

Google can't really compete with a scholarly reference book like this. The new edition is out in paperback at £12.99   more »