Blog

  • 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

  • House haunting

    Splashing vinegar and sugar and warmed-then-cooled water resentfully into a vase. A recipe for flower preservation to ensnare a buyer for the house. I am moving and already the process is driving me out of my skull insane. The house is a dream – for someone else. It is now someone else’s house that I… Read more

  • Classical Staffordshire

    I had only a few minutes to look round the Royal Pump Room museum at Leamington Spa but I saw these Staffordshire figurines and wanted to find out more about them. The museum label gives a little information about their date and place of production, and that Andromache was bequeathed by Mr F H A… Read more