Roma Novan heroines and gender pressure on men

The Roma Nova heroines – Carina and Aurelia Mitela – are ‘tough gals’; dedicated, strong-willed, physically and mentally resilient and tied into their sense of history and duty. Underlying all this, their driving force is their self-belief.

Carina, despite her disrupted childhood and separation from Roma Nova until she was twenty-four, has embraced Roma Novan […]

Lupercalia – Not an ancestor of Valentine's Day

Lupercales, Andrea Camassei (1602-1649), Prado Museum

Mid February, the time of roses and chocolate when romance is in the air… And isn’t it the quaint descendant of the old Roman festival of Lupercalia?

Er, no. ‘Quaint’ is definitely not the word.

In AD 495, Christian bishop of Rome, Gelasius, finally managed to […]

Robert Harris, one of the inspirations for Roma Nova’s existence

When I first picked up Robert Harris’ Fatherland in my local independent bookshop in 1992, I was fascinated by the concept of ‘what if Nazi Germany had won the war?’ What would have been the alternate path of history?

Fatherland was intrinsically a political thriller. In 1992, the whole of Europe was attempting to realign […]