This feels like a brag but my book is now in print, and there is little point in writing it a book if nobody is going to read it so I thought I’d post about it.

This is an academic book – it does have some stories in it, biographies really, that can be picked out and enjoyed as stories but mostly it’s part of a conversation with nerds past and present who want to deal with the intricacies of arguments about Roman army life and what it looks like from different perspectives. It’s also an argument about evidence and how it’s collected and what that means for the stories we tell ourselves. But that’s for the reviewers now. If there are any left after the axe is taken to humanities departments.

Whatever they think, the reviewers certainly won’t act like the men who definitely loathe what I research and say because they all told me loudly in the tabloids and on Twitter when I wrote about the British Museum’s ‘Legion’ exhibition last year. Going by the amount of abuse I got after that blogpost and tweet, I think they mostly hate that women get to say anything, which is their bad luck. Sorry guys, I only skim-read your uninventive insults about witches and women’s anatomy that were so stereotypical they were strangely impersonal – Ovid they certainly weren’t.

I do think it’s important how we think and talk about the Roman army in a modern context where research is being pulled because it has shocking, bannable words like ‘women’ and ‘gender’ and ‘race’ in it and major political leaders flirt with so-called ‘Roman’ salutes. It’s taken an academic timescale to be (or about to be) published, but my review of the British Museum’s ‘Legion’ and St Alban museum’s ‘Women Everywhere’, for the European Journal of Archaeology, is a contribution to this ongoing conversation.

Anyway ‘Military Households’ is now available from BAR publishing as well as the usual bookshops and websites, and I’m feeling pretty happy about that.