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The ancient Roman empire was the supreme arena, where emperors had no choice but to fight, to thrill, to dazzle. To rule as a Caesar was to stand as an actor upon the great stage of the world. No biography invites us into the lives of the Caesars more vividly or intimately than that by Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, written from the centre of Rome and power, in AD 121. Placing each Caesar in the context of the generations that had gone before, and connecting personality with policy, Suetonius injected flesh and blood into their stories.

In Unfortunately, She was a Nymphomaniac, Smith pieces together the stories of these women, showing how they struggled for control of their lives at a time when both the law and culture were stacked against them. It is not a conventional history but an interpretation of the original texts informed by what we know now about the mechanics of domestic abuse. There are no ‘nymphomaniacs’ here but the picture that emerges is one of spirited, inspiring and sometimes reckless resistance to male authority.

In The Buried City, the director of Pompeii, Gabriel Zuchtriegel takes us on a behind-the-scenes tour of the city and reveals the new artefacts and remains that are now being unearthed in the biggest dig of the site in a generation. He reconstructs Pompeii as it would have been, revealing who lived here, what mattered to them and what happened in their final hours, while also reflecting on our role as keepers of this heritage.

From emperors to empresses, poets to prostitutes, slaves to plebs, ancient Rome was a wealth of different experiences and expectations-nowhere more so than around the subject of sex and sexuality. The image of ancient Rome that has come down to us is one of sexual excess: emperors gripped by perversion partaking in pleasure with whomever and whatever they fancied during weeklong orgies.

Ever since the Greek and Roman historians speculated on the seemingly ever-growing violence and greed of the world, metal has been to blame. We have gone from a “golden age” of peace and shared plenty, to an “iron age of bloodshed and conquest”—and beyond. Today, according to geologist Shefa Siegel, we are threatened not by metal, but by its absence. Metal that once lay close enough to the surface of the earth so that primitive miners could more or less chip off what they needed is now so scarce that entire landscapes are pulverized to extract a fine dust of precious, powdered ore.