The launch of one of my videos on YouTube is always accompanied by a flurry of PR activity.  Well actually, I just tweet it a couple of times in the hope that somebody somewhere will notice.   From time to time I even get some responses.  My most recent one on the death of Alaric

Alaric died suddenly after a short fever.  He was somewhere around forty years old. For all his urbane sophistication and his desire to become a Roman, he was given a truly barbarian funeral.  The course of the river Busento was diverted and his body buried under its bed.  Then the river was restored to its

I get a steady stream of offers of books to review, most of which I turn down.  I don’t have enough time to read the books I already have on my list without adding more to them.  But this one looked interesting.  It is Sibyls by Jorge Guillermo of whom I haven’t heard before.   I

I woke up this morning to the news that Tony Benn had died. I am in my mid-Fifties now and I suspect I will never again have the feeling of witnessing history I had one day in 1981 when I listened to the result of the deputy leadership election between Benn and Denis Healey. My

In its day the Club of Rome was a very influential book.  I was around in its day and bought a copy.  The woman I was later to marry bought a copy too, so for many years we had two copies.  It seemed particularly inappropriate given that one of its messages was that we are

I am working through the chapters of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire translating the majestic sweep of the original narrative into modern English. There are times when this gets tough, and this is one of them. Gibbon is a great writer and this is one of his greatest sections. I will do