Category Archives: Historical fiction

Historical fiction, Writing, Writing Form

Historical dialogue and habits of speech

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Today I want to continue the exploration of historical narrative with a scattering of ways in which a common speech is used differently by different speakers, depending on their background and upbringing. We all trail personal history into our conversation, in ways which can be very illuminating.

Statues - Delos
The phenomenon can be easily heard in modern English. Regional differences within the United Kingdom and other countries whose major language is English provide a rich source of examples, but real diversity appears where English is a widespread second language. Chinglish and Hinglish, living creations of Chinese (Mandarin) and Hindi speakers, are vibrant and fascinating arrivals on the world stage. They are not random free-for-all inventions: they follow a set of grammatical and structural patterns derived from a fusion of both sources. The flow goes both ways as English absorbs habits of speech from elsewhere. “Long time no see” is pure Mandarin, converted word for word into English and now completely understood.

An eye opener for me, brought up in the south of England, was hearing how people from the north of the country spoke. I don’t mean different vocalisation of vowel sounds, like saying cassle instead of carsel for castle, but something more deeply built in to the thought process.

For example, one thing which struck me early on was the regular use of similes in everyday speech – “as hard as bell metal” was one that I heard pretty much at first exposure. But the more I listened, the more I heard this regular, unconscious use of simile to enrich dialogue, in ways which (at the time, at least) were not common down south. Now, rather later on I learned all about the historical division of the country between Dane and Saxon, and the various ways this is found in placenames and the like. But this early recognition that the differences showed up not just in atomic fragments of words, but in a whole way of imagining the world, has stayed with me.

Another regional difference which some readers will recognise appears in how we verbally contract a negation. In some parts of England we say “they won’t” whereas in other parts we say “they’ll not“. Both are valid, there is no difficulty in understanding each of them, and I cannot see any real difference in meaning of emphasis between the two: they simply reflect preference and habit.

Coined words are another good example. You can have a word which obeys perfectly logical patterns in English, but simply (for whatever reason) did not exist. When I was young the word “somewhen” as a parallel to “somewhere” did not exist, but sometime between then and now it has entered common circulation – it is even accepted by the spell check as I write this! Recently I heard “everywhen” being used – again a logical parallel to “everywhere” but not yet in use (and not recognised by my spellcheck). Asimov coined words like this in a few places, including in “The End of Eternity” where the technicians used the words “upwhen” and “downwhen” to describe temporal direction.

Now sometimes such words are a logical deduction from pre-existing ones, as above, but other times they are a direct carry-over from a real word in a person’s mother tongue into a presumed one in a target language. German is particularly good at simply coining new words by adding together existing ones in order to establish a specific shade of meaning. So a speaker of a second language may simply assume that a parallel exists to one in his or her native language, and coin the word fresh.

So all these ideas – and more – suggest ways to indicate conversational difference between speakers sharing language. More to follow next time, looking at use of verbs and word order…

Historical fiction, Reading Challenge, Review

Review – The Devil’s Monk, by J.R. (Jack) Russell

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The Devil’s Monk is set in the turbulent days after the reign of Alfred. The background, then, is a time of enormous transition for Britain. There was political and military struggle, as Angles, Saxons, and Danes contended for mastery of the land and the older British tribes were squeezed out. There was religious change, as Christianity gradually lured people away from the older gods. And, at least for the central character of this book, Bald, there is personal transformation, as he decides over a period of years what he can contend with and what must simply be accepted.

Buy The Devil’s Monk from Amazon.co.uk
Buy The Devil’s Monk from Amazon.com
Cover image - The Devil's Monk
Bald, through whom we witness the events and people of the age, is a herbalist. He is known to the modern age through the pages of an old medical text, The Leechbook of Bald, now in the British LIbrary. Jack has done a good job of filling in a hypothetical biography for Bald. It is never altogether clear whether Bald’s medical successes are due to the remedies he prepares, or the result of sympathetic attention to the real causes of malaise. Even today, cures and healings sometimes defy explanation, and Bald’s world view is well suited to his role, being deeply rooted in the old ways, with a weak grasp of the healing role of Christ as sufferer overlaid on top.

On a storytelling level, it took me a while to settle in to this book, since the first part seemed rather disjointed. As the dichotomy of Bald’s simultaneous power and impotence came to the fore, the tale held me more. Secondary characters also get more development in the later stages. It is not a fast paced book, but the subject matter does not require it to be, and the story is better suited to the slow unravelling of hearts, lives, and nations that we find in the pages. There are frequent citations from the herbal manual woven into the plot, together with a few extracts from the poetry of the age; these add to the atmosphere, though the translation used from the Old English is sometimes heavy going.

Overall for me this was a four star book. I enjoyed reading about the history of places which I know in contemporary England – Eashing, Winchester, London, York and Glastonbury among others. The historical research which has gone into the book seems solid. However, it was a book which interested me intellectually rather than engaged me emotionally. I would have enjoyed it more if the emotional dimension had been more accessible.

At about the same time I also read A Twisted Cross by the same author, an exploration of one of the crusades. Here I felt that Jack had not given himself enough narrative space to do his subject justice. Social differences and prejudices are well handled, but religious views less so, and in a way which to me spoke more of modern habits of thought than medieval ones. The short format left too much unexplored about a potentially fascinating period and range of characters. This book would have gained a lot by having the same systematic exploration of the main character as was done for Bald in The Devil’s Monk.

Historical fiction, Writing, Writing Form

Historical dialogue and personal names

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Last time (http://richardabbott.authorsxpress.com/2014/10/09/historical-dialogue-and-social-position/) I wrote about the use of formality in dialogue, and some of the ways that modern English could and could not reflect that.

Statue, Delos, Cyclades islands
Today I am thinking about an easier area to capture – the use of personal names. In the UK (and I believe also in other countries such as the US), once you have said “hello Richard” as we start to talk, it would be rare to use it again in the same conversation unless you wanted to emphasise something. “Don’t be ridiculous, Richard“, perhaps, or maybe “were you listening, Richard“, or even “Richard! You won’t forget this time, will you?“.

But this is not the case globally. Even when English is used as a common language, some cultures use personal names very much more. Several years ago, when I first came across this, I found it a bit disconcerting; now I really like it, and enjoy the way it reestablishes the person-to-person link periodically in the conversation.

There is, I think, something satisfyingly engaging about using a personal name. It might signal intimacy in some situations, but does not have to, and can easily be blended with formal terms of address in those many languages that use them. It’s not just a way to identify who you are speaking to in a group, which could easily happen in English too. There is something affirmatory about the use of a name which, now I am used to it, is very satisfying.

Now, we have very limited access into casual speech in the ancient world, since most of the written records are necessarily formal. Where speech is included, it is probably representative of the occasion rather than a realistic attempt to capture it. So, in the kind of situation which I deal with a lot, where people are meeting casually and often cross-culturally, the field is open.

Varying the use of personal names between groups, and perhaps showing different reactions to this, helps these different groups to have their own identity. Not all groups have to use language – or personal names – the same way that we do in contemporary Europe or the USA!

Historical fiction, Writing, Writing Form

Historical dialogue and social position

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I thought I’d go back today to the subject of handling conversation in historical fiction. In my own books, and many others I read, several different groups intersect, each with different culture or ethnicity. They have to communicate in a shared language: how should one write about this? Some months ago I wrote a post called Historical dialogue and translation which looked at this from one angle: here is a different angle.

Speaker's area on Santorini (Thira)
Some writers make effective use of dialect – rural English vs London in the 19th century, for example, which I came across in Sue Millard’s Coachman. So long as the author can handle the differences confidently, and the end result is comprehensible, this can work. However, I have met some readers who just don’t like this in principle. In any case, for me (and many others) the original languages my characters speak are nothing to do with English. Sure, I could imagine someone from Gedjet (Gaza) speaking in a West Country accent, or someone from Hatsor sounding like a Yorkshireman, but those ideas would be pretty much unconnected to reality.

So today I am thinking about less obvious patterns. Take, for example, how we signal relative rank. Modern English is quite sparing in this. If we want to indicate hierarchy in speech, we have to include special words to do so – “Your Majesty“, “my lady“, “sir“, “boss” and so on. But many languages have this built in at a much deeper level. Across most of Asia, it is not possible to address somebody without making a deliberate choice about using formal or informal terms of address.

English lost most of these language signals in the years after the Norman Conquest, as Norman French and Saxon English wore each other down into a single thing. The last remnants were probably variations of the old pronoun “thou“, which through lack of use dwindled into an archaic sounding, formal way to address deity. It is a rather sad decline for a word which once indicated intimacy. Its living parallels such as French tu and Hindi tum still convey closeness and familiarity today.

In some places, however, using proper modes of address is not just a sign of respect, but an acknowledgement of absolute place in a social hierarchy. Get it wrong, and you don’t just make a grammatical slip, but potentially destroy a relationship before it ever starts. It is essentially impossible to mirror this in written English, and the most that can be done is, positively, by including specific terms of respect, or negatively, by showing the reaction of the hearers.

That’s it for today. Next time I will be talking about something we can control more easily in writing – the use of personal names in conversation.

Extract, Historical fiction, History, The Flame Before Us, Writing

The end of the Bronze Age in the middle east

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This post was prompted by a recent Facebook link concerning battle reenactment societies and the long sword. Quite an exciting thing in its own right, but my thoughts inevitably strayed earlier in time. The long sword is often linked with Viking or medieval times, but there is good evidence that its introduction was a major contributory cause to the collapse of Bronze Age culture in the middle east.

This cultural collapse has had several proposed causes over the years, including mass tribal migration, climate change and natural disasters. The main provocative question is why such factors caused collapse of a social hierarchy this time, when similar issues had been faced and survived before.

Part of the battle between Rameses III and the Sea Peoples
Around 1200BC, all around the eastern Mediterranean, well established cultures fell and cities were sacked. The incoming wave of new people was – just – halted at the borders of Egypt. When society recovered, the former chariot-based elite groups had fallen from power. Chariots ceased to be the dominant battlefield weapon, and became a mere transport vehicle used to convey heroes to the front line or ride in triumph afterwards.

Militarily, two weapons emerged as the new superior choice. One was the javelin, and the other the long sword. The new swords were considerably longer than the previous patterns, and were weighted so as to slash rather than thrust. Together, skirmishing bands and armies were able to defeat the bow-armed chariot riders who had ruled before, and in the process overturned the social order which had elevated charioteers into the nobility. From the Mediterranean shores across to North India, the day of the elite charioteer was over. It was a social change as profound as the slaughter of mounted Medieval knights by peasants armed with the longbow.

Turning to fiction, The Flame Before Us explores this social revolution from both sides. Here’s a brief extract. Yasib, son of a noble family from the fallen city of Ikaret (modern Ugarit) is talking with Nikleos, an older man whose clan is part of the wave of newcomers. Their cross-cultural friendship is in its early stages.

Cover image idea - The Flame Before Us

“In Ikaret, do you train your boys like this?”

“Not really with throwing weapons. Some learn the bow. Some learn to direct the chariot horses, and the best ones train to shoot arrows while riding at speed. Boys from the common families learn to use a spear or the stabbing sword. When the city fell it was at night. They say that traitors opened the gates and set fires near the docks. If we had been able to meet the attackers with chariots the city would stand yet. But they were away from the city, serving the great King of the North along his borderlands.”

Nikleos pulled a face. “That day has gone. I have seen battlefields littered with broken chariots and dead horses, where living men armed with javelins and the long sword mastered them. Against that, a chariot is no better than an ox cart, and is fit only to carry men to the place where they will fight hand to hand.”

Yasib thought for a while, then turned away from the up and down curves of the missiles.

“I was in training to be a runner; a man who keeps close to the chariots in order to protect the fallen on our side and harass those of the enemy. I do not really have the speed for it, but my father wanted me to learn the runner’s discipline before ever I took up the reins. Still less be the bowman on board. But perhaps now I will never be a rider.”

“Why would you want to be?”

Yasib looked at him. “Why not? The rider has a place of honour among men of rank.”

“Look at these boys, Yasib. They are learning the javelin. When they are older they will learn the longsword, but already these boys could defeat a chariot.”

Yasib shook his head in disbelief. “They have no skill with the bow.”

“They do not need it. There are ten boys here. Think of them spread out so that your bowshots would not easily strike them. They throw ten javelins, and even at their age one or two might hit a horse at the walk. Another few years, and most will hit a horse at the trot or the canter.”

“You fight against horses?” He sounded shocked. “What harm have the horses ever done to you?”

Nikleos shrugged. “We fight to win battles. No horse: no chariot. No chariot: no kingdom. Better for you that you never become a rider, perhaps.”

Look out for The Flame Before Us early next year!

Historical fiction, History

All around Africa

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A slightly unusual historical post from me today, being about an event over half a millennium later than my normal era. Today I am writing about an expedition commissioned by Pharaoh Necho II, a 26th dynasty Egyptian who reigned around 600 BCE. He is famous for a couple of things, not least being the fact that he was the first pharaoh to cross the Euphrates River since Thutmose III – over 800 years earlier. Sadly the military world had passed the Egyptians by, and by the end of Necho’s reign he had been driven back again, and almost all of their former territories had been captured by the Babylonians.

Replica ship - photo served from http://www.phoenicia.org.uk/
But Necho was more than just an over-ambitious general – he enthusiastically sponsored major building works and exploratory journeys. Perhaps the most impressive of these, and the one which ought to be remembered as one of the world’s great expeditions, was to commission Phoenician sailors to go around Africa. They set off from the Red Sea, and after some three years reappeared through the Straights of Gibraltar to dock at Alexandria. Not all of the journey was at sea – they moored for long enough in a few places to grow crops. The account comes down to us via the Greek historian Herodotus, and confirmed to the ancient world that Africa could in fact be circumnavigated. It took European sailors until 1488 to replicate the rounding of Africa.

Route map - recent reconstruction journey 2008-2010 - image served from http://www.phoenicia.org.uk/
There is general agreement that the Phoenicians were great sailors and explorers. Their homeland was in what is now Lebanon and Syria, but Phoenician colonies were located in many parts of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic coasts of north Africa, Spain and Portugal. The city of Carthage was originally a Phoenician colony which attained considerable influence and power in her own right, until being crushed by Rome. Phoenician and Carthaginian ships certainly reached the British Isles, and there are regular speculations just how far their crews travelled. Did they reach the groups of islands out in the Atlantic? Possibly the Americas? There is no certain evidence of this, but their ships were certainly seaworthy enough for it to be a real possibility.

In fairness one should point out that not all Egyptologists feel that the story is credible. Opinion was similarly divided in the ancient world: Pliny believed it, but Ptolemy did not. Herodotus records his personal disbelief, but does faithfully record evidence that the ships were at very least south of the equator, with the sun at noon to the north rather than the south. Given the knowledge we now have about journeys that the Phoenicians did undertake, and the general robustness of their ship construction, we can certainly say that they could have done it.

Why am I writing about this? Well, I have been reading up about Phoenician shipping as very early research for another idea… the next book after The Flame Before Us is complete!

(Picture and map source – http://www.phoenicia.org.uk/)

Historical fiction, History, In a Milk and Honeyed Land, The Flame Before Us, Writing

So who was Shamgar son of Anath?

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“Shamgar son of Anath, who struck down six hundred Philistines with an ox-goad” – Judges 3:31

This particular snippet from early in the biblical book of Judges seems at first sight not much more than a propaganda note about the superiority of the Israelite defenders against the bad-guy Philistine arrivals. But actually there is a lot more here than meets the eye.

Inscribed arrow or javelin head
A lot of the regular discussion circles around whether 600 was intended to really be a literal body count, or is simply an absurdly inflated number chosen to intimidate. And what exactly does ox-goad mean in this text? Was it literally an agricultural implement repurposed for war – something which has often happened through history – or was it a nickname for some other weapon?

There is a lot more to glean from these few words. Shamgar is not an Israelite name, nor even one drawn from the broader Semitic language family. It seems to be Hurrian in origin. If so, the original form was probably Shimigar, where Shimi was a Hurrian sun god. The Hurrians were a prominent elite group through most of the second millennium BC in the middle east, appearing as minor kings, nobility, or warrior leaders. They spread down from the north of Mesopotamia, roughly where the Kurdish lands are today, and flourished for some time before being integrated into the general population at the start of the first millennium and disappearing as a recognisable group.

So was the historical Shamgar behind our text actually an accomplished military leader, named after another nation’s god, with the 600 being killed not personally by him but rather by men under his command?

Anath (sometimes Anat) is the name of a particularly passionate and warlike Canaanite goddess, and in any event is grammatically female rather than male. Biblical commentators have noticed the oddity here – the Hebrews of this era routinely identified a person through their father, not their mother. To resolve this some have proposed that Anath was also used as a common male name, meaning something like “answered“.

There are, perhaps, easier solutions. One is to suggest that in this early stage, some groups who affiliated with the Hebrews really did identify through the mother’s line. Readers of In a Milk and Honeyed Land will know that the four towns I write about there do just this.

Another possibility arose from archaeological discoveries of Bronze Age arrowheads and javelin heads from various parts of the Levant. Many of these have names scratched into them, and “son of Anath” appears several times. (The image above of one of these arrowheads has been supplied by the Biblical Archaeology Society website). For example, we know of one “Abdi-Labit son of Anath“. The title also turns up in Ugarit and even in Egypt as well as Canaan. Now it could be, of course, that Anath was a rather common name after all, and that many ethnic groups really did count lineage through the mother.

But it seems more likely that what we see here is actually the identifying mark of a warrior class. When you had proved yourself in some way you were entitled to call yourself a son of Anath. Human nature being what it is, I am sure that if there was an original band who coined the name and were successful, others would copy it for themselves.

In The Flame Before Us I follow this line. You will meet there a certain Shimmigar, who is a member of a small band of skilled warriors responsible for protecting the northern borders of Ibriym (Hebrew) territory. Find out more in a few months’ time!

Historical fiction, Reading Challenge, Review

Review – After Flodden, by Rosemary Goring

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Unsurprisingly, After Flodden is set in the aftermath of the 1513 Battle of Flodden, which was a major disaster for the Scottish cause. The battle itself, and some other background information, is described in flashback scenes, with the main narrative occurring after the event during the closing months of 1513. Each chapter is marked with a date, and since they do not always happen in chronological order it can be important to take note of this.

Buy After Flodden from Amazon.co.uk
Buy After Flodden from Amazon.com
Cover image - After Flodden
Rosemary deals with the wider political stage only in passing, and for the most part we follow particular individuals as they try to come to terms with the battle and its aftermath. These individuals each have personal reasons for wanting to know more, ranging from a desperate quest for a family member to the desire to find a scapegoat for the failure. The various threads interact with one another from an early stage of the book, so you are not left wondering how the pieces join up. However, some aspects of motive and personal history are deliberately withheld until near the end.

Rosemary uses dialect a great deal in the book, to distinguish both social class and geographic origin. In particular, characters from Scotland itself speak differently from those on the borders in what is now Northumberland. I am very fond of that county, and it was good to see it being explored in this way. The most likeable characters, and the ones treated most sympathetically, are precisely those from along this turbulent strip of constantly debated land. I cannot say how accurate the dialect is, but it certainly works to help place the characters.

However, I found the story as a whole slightly perplexing. The “whodunit” thread trying to account for the military disaster did not sit very comfortably, to my eyes, with the exploration of personal loyalty and love, and it felt as though too much importance was being put on the shoulders of one rather insignificant family. The fact that the chapters following the main events (ie not the flashback moments) were almost, but not quite, in temporal order did not help here.

A retreat into catatonia is used quite often in the book to basically get a character out of the way. In some cases it is a consequence of battle trauma, in others there is a hereditary factor, and in others it seems to be simply a response to the failure of plans and intentions. I found this repeated refrain, mixed with the diversity of causes, to be rather frustrating. Perhaps Rosemary was trying to mirror something of the condition of Scotland in this, where national trauma and the failure of grand schemes backfired into a turmoil of internal violence and insanity. Since she does not foreground the national dimensions of life, it is hard to tell.

For me, another 4* book. The place and time of After Flodden were interesting, and the use of dialect added considerably to the characters, but I found the story itself a little disjointed. I would have liked some exploration of the national narratives as well as personal. After all, it would be less than 100 years from this point of violent incompatibility between England and Scotland, up until the act of union in which a joint ruler was acknowledged. It is very hard from within the book to see how this would be at all feasible.

Historical fiction, Review, Scenes from a Life

Some reviews on the HNS web site

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Periodically the Historical Novel Society (HNS) uploads a bunch of reviews to its web site at http://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/. The most recent batch was of interest to me for two reasons. First, a review of Scenes from a Life has appeared (http://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/scenes-from-a-life/), which says some nice things:

Cover image - Scenes from a Life

…It took me a while to warm to Makty-Rasut but he grew on me. The author is extremely knowledgeable of his subject and the minute detail brings the story vividly to life, to the point where you can almost feel the sand and the heat.
With a good mix of well-written characters, the tale pleasantly meanders like the River Nile, which is central to the story, and makes for a most enjoyable, informative read.

Secondly a review that I wrote has now gone live so I am now free to distribute elsewhere. Find the whole at http://historicalnovelsociety.org/reviews/city-of-dreams-3/: here it is.

City of Dreams follows Anna, a Russian who moves to Paris on the verge of the 1865 Franco-Prussian war. Early in the story she falls from riches to rags, in a way reminiscent of Fantine from Les Miserables, though Anna’s starting point is higher and her decline not so disastrous. After a brief period in comparative poverty, Anna finds a comfortable career as mistress to a selection of wealthy men. The war ushers in a troubled period for the city and occupants.

The recounting of the history was more compelling than the personal drama. Harriet comments that the Franco-Prussian war is somewhat overlooked, I certainly knew little about it, and the only familiar event was the eating of zoo animals during the siege. The description of the progress of the war was illuminating.

The author invites us to draw parallels between Anna and émigré brides of today, with all the potential for social dislocation and dismissal. She also enables us to share an outsider’s view of France. However, I found it difficult to engage with Anna, and the city at large was the more vivid character.

Readers looking for nineteenth-century stories away from the obvious Napoleonic or British Empire settings might enjoy City of Dreams. It is, however, hard to classify. Although touching on battles, it is not a war book. There are sexual elements, but it is not a romance. It is, I think, best read as a reflection of Paris herself.

Technically the book was well turned out; proofreading was thorough. A few chapters ended with a couple of lines slipping onto a new page; a final edit would easily correct these.

Historical fiction, Reading Challenge, Review

Review – Augustus, by John Williams

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Augustus, by John Williams, was another book club choice: I’m not sure that I would have picked it out myself. I have come away with mixed feelings. It is very obviously a carefully written book, intricately written entirely in epistolary form. Strictly, not all sections are letters, as we have diary entries, military orders, official records and such like as well. However, every part has a sense of formally constructed distance – we are not experiencing things as they happen, but rather we are shown a highly selected series of personal reflections on events.

Buy Augustus from Amazon.co.uk
Buy Augustus from Amazon.com
Cover image - Augustus
Although the progress of recounted events proceeds almost entirely in linear order, the time sequence of the reflections themselves is extremely nonlinear. A letter written just hours after a key moment is followed by a memoir extract from decades later. Likewise, the perspectives offered by the writers range from enthusiastic through manipulative to hostile. Most of the entries are acutely conscious of the political games being played, and are seeking to influence others one way or another. There is a constant sense that nobody’s words can really be trusted.

This was certainly an interesting ploy, but one which for me did not quite work. The cast of involved people was very large, and their writing styles not sufficiently diverse for me to pick them out easily. John identifies each sender and recipient in a short header, as well as the date of the item, but I found it all too easy to forget after a couple of page turns, and on a Kindle it was not easy to flick back to the header to remind myself. It is, I think, a book which actually needs to be read in a physical copy, with the consequent ease of keeping your thumb in a page and flipping to and fro. Indeed, I realised half-way through that you really need a large diagram beside you tracing who knows whom and the nature of each relationship (which changes through time).

I think the book might work for those who like political machinations. So far as I was concerned, I started to think quite early on that I wasn’t really interested in who was trying to deceive whom and why. By the time I thought of tracking relationships on paper, I had already ceased to really care who won and who lost, since their personal plots and preoccupations did not interest me (despite apparently deciding the fate of the Roman world).

There are three main divisions of the book. The first is male dominated and follows the saga to the defeat of Mark Anthony, at which point Rome is free of civil war. A second, with a higher proportion of female voices, takes us through to Augustus’s successful defeat of a last conspiracy against him. The final, much briefer, section is almost entirely a soliloquy of Augustus himself, close to death and reflecting on his life. Each stage sees him gain something and lose something, and the reader is left to decide if the gain was worth the loss.

Overall a modest four star book for me. I am glad to have read it, but cannot imagine reading it again. It is carefully constructed, but left me cold, partly because the overwhelming majority of the book concerns itself with an elite group of men that I cannot identify with. I think it was reasonably well researched, but am not enough of an expert on Roman history to know for sure, and there were a couple of places in the Egyptian section that I was very dubious about. If you like immersing yourself in Roman politics, you may well love this book – but make sure you read it with pen and paper beside you to keep track of the intricate web of personal interactions.