A sweeping, revisionist history of the Roman Empire from one of our foremost classicists. Ancient Rome was an imposing city even by modern standards, a sprawling imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, a "mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride and murderous civil war" that served as the seat of power for an empire that spanned from Spain to Syria. Yet how did all this emerge from what was once an insignificant village in central Italy? In S.P.Q.R...

Sunday Times Top 10 BestsellerShortlisted for a British Book Industry Book of the Year Award 2016The new series Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit is on BBC2Ancient Rome matters.Its history of empire, conquest, cruelty and excess is something against which we still judge ourselves. Its myths and stories - from Romulus and Remus to the Rape of Lucretia - still strike a chord with us. And its debates about citizenship, security and the rights of the individua...

A sudden interest in the occult swept through the English village of Plummergen.Ouija boards were replacing the best china in many a cozy cottage. It might be quite the thing for maiden ladies and persnickity aunts, but it wasn’t Miss Seeton’s cup of tea . . . until Scotland Yard requested she go undercover to investigate sinister shenanigans in the Kentish countryside.A flim-flam was afoot in the local witches' coven - and magic could be a...

**‘**Grandparenting is a long-awaited, well-informed, personal and well-researched insight into what it means to be a grandparent... A wonderful book’ JULIA SAMUEL, author of Every Family Has a StoryThe birth of a grandchild is a cause for celebration. But when a child becomes a parent themselves, existing family structures are radically altered. Old tensions between parents and their adult children may come into ...

A celebration of the senses with practical advice on how to enhance sensory experience in your gardenStep outdoors and let your space nourish all of your senses and settle a busy mind.Discover how to garden to enliven all five senses - touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste - to build a connection with the world around you and bring joy and wonder into the everyday. Find out how simply being outside can help to ground and calm you, and learn what plants to grow to nourish ...

"Very occasionally a tragedy turns into a triumph. This wonderful, searing book is such a moment. Rush to read it & be thankful." – Miriam MargolyesLast night Ben phoned from Bermuda, collect as usual. I’d asked – though heaven knows why, as we avoid soppy talk – if he still loved me.He had said, ‘Course I do.’He would be home for a visit once the race was over. He could not say exactly when but would keep in touch.It is early ...

Eleanor Lee is fiercely independent. She has lived alone well into her nineties, despite her now near-total blindness. Now, finally, she has been persuaded by her children to move into a home. She employs Peter, a recent graduate nursing a broken heart, to spend the summer sorting through her attic – papers, photographs, books and letters – ahead of the move. These fragments of her own history unleash in Eleanor a long-concealed story of forbidden love, betrayal, passion, grief and self-sa...

Miss Seeton is most embarrassed . . .Her every attempt at a portrait of little Effie Goffer has become a chilling picture of a corpse. Is Miss Seeton actually drawing a clue to a series of child murders in rural England?Scotland Yard thinks so, and wants Miss Seeton to turn from sketching . . . to catching a killer skilled in a very deadly art.Retired art teacher Miss Seeton steps in where Scotland Yard stumbles. Armed with only her sketch p...

Pompeii is the most famous archaeological site in the world, visited by more than two million people each year. Yet it is also one of the most puzzling, with an intriguing and sometimes violent history.Destroyed by Vesuvius in 79 CE, the ruins of Pompeii offer the best evidence we have of life in the Roman Empire. But the eruptions are only part of the story. In The Fires of Vesuvius, acclaimed historian Mary Beard makes sense of the remains. She explores what kind of town...

It’s ‘set an artist to catch an artist’ . . .When a flood of perfectly faked banknotes hits the market, retired art teacher Miss Emily Seeton, the Yard’s famed ‘MissEss’, is chosen to investigate a respected Geneva bank. Somehow, the forger is also mixed up in the theft of valuable paintings.But Miss S. is new to air travel – surely the names Geneva and ‘Genova’ must be the same place? Bamboozling both the crooks and the police who vainly t...

“Actually—” Oh, dear, this was most embarrassing. It sounded so—so aggressive. But she must be exact. “Actually I was a little angry—at his rudeness, you know—so I poked him in the back...“When Miss Seeton walks out after a performance of Carmen and witnesses a real-life stabbing, all she can recall is a shadowy figure. But how could she have guessed that her latest artistic endeavor is a picture-perfect portrait of the killer?

Brought to you by Penguin.In 402 AD, after invading tribes broke through the Alpine frontiers of Italy and threatened the imperial government in Milan, the young Emperor Honorius made the momentous decision to move his capital to a small, easy defendable city in the Po estuary - Ravenna. From then until 751 AD, Ravenna was first the capital of the Western Roman Empire, then that of the immense kingdom of Theoderic the Goth and finally the centre of Byzantine power ...