Eating the Roman way

A boy holding a platter of fruits and a bucket of crab(?) in a kitchen with fish and squid, on the June panel from a mosaic depicting the months (3rd century) CC Commons – creator Sailko

Food is one of the most powerful ways of conveying information about characters. It shows readers not […]

Come into my Roman garden...

My ‘Roman’ garden

Gardening and nosing around other people’s gardens are two of my favourite hobbies; my own is designed on Roman lines and I even have a Roman herb garden. You’ll know that I often mention gardens, plants and flowers in the Roma Nova books; Carina has the key to a walled […]

How to build an alternative history story

Romans in the 21st century? Possibly provocative, but a perfectly feasible venture into alternative history fiction. How do you do this with no historical foundation?

Setting a story in the past or in another country is already a challenge. But if you invent the country and need to meld it with history that the reader […]