Blog

  • Numbered days

    Been thinking about numbers lately as several friends have reached the half century mark, five sixths of the three score years that denotes old age, or once did. Ten years then left to the expectation of a lifespan. Threescore and ten I can remember well – Old Man, Macbeth. Except that lifespan has increased in… Read more

  • Great-granddad Samuel and the Rudston Venus mosaic

    “It was a woman with a mirror,” said mum when we met up. She confirmed what I already had guessed, that the mosaic that I’d been looking up for research reasons was the same as the mosaic her mum’s dad had had a hand in the finding. The family story goes that my Great Granddad… Read more

  • Unrelatable Romans

    Writing and talking about Romans again and spending a lot of time thinking about Roman slavery. Mostly for my ‘Friends, Romans and Enslavers’ talk for the Vindolanda Trust that you can watch online on their YouTube channel. Few people who know anything about history would be surprised to hear that people were enslaved in large… Read more

  • Salt sellers

    There is a scandal over a memoir I read some time ago. It’s a book called ‘The Salt Path’ and what it purported to be was a truthful tale of personal triumph over terminal illness and poverty, a hooky kind of book that reeled me right in. The scandal is that it seems to be… Read more

  • No Large Language Models were harmed in writing this.

    I am reading a history book that is so full of facts they roll away from my grasp like tiny kaleidoscope beads and I can barely see the pattern they make. It makes me think about the mirrored lines between fiction and what declares that it is not fiction, and how the facts in the… Read more

  • Hearsay history

    I’m writing a generalist book about Roman life as it was lived on Hadrian’s Wall and it’s bringing up all sorts of methodological thoughts about how to write this kind of book. These type of books, the books that appear in Waterstones or in museum bookshops (as mine is more likely to) need to be… Read more