JULIA PRIMA - cover reveal!

Opening the email from cover designer Jessica Bell is exciting. But the moment I click to open the image file itself brings feelings of joy, fear, anticipation and hope. When it opens on the screen, I am enveloped in wonder and admiration. There’s the heroine. There’s her determination, her own fear, her courage.

Here is […]

Reasons for the fall of Rome?

‘Destruction’ by Thomas Cole, painted 1833–1836, part of a series ‘The Course of Empire’

Discussion of the the reasons for the ‘fall’ of the Western Roman Empire will go on forever and everybody will have their pet one. The classic book is The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, […]

Taking the plunge - Roman baths

The Baths at Caracalla, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, 1899

Baths were such an intrinsic part of the Roman world that we can’t think of one without the other. Everybody went to the baths – everybody.

Today we see bathing as something we do privately in the home, but bathing in Rome was a communal, social […]