The most celebrated of all ancient Romans almost met a watery end before he’d made his big splash in the vast ocean of history. In 75 BC, Julius Caesar – then in his mid-20s and yet to establish himse

Over a long career, John Hardman has specialised to great effect in teasing out, from speeches, decrees, minutes, memoranda, letters, diaries and unsent drafts, the varied moods of French political de

What the West owes to the ancient world

All serious scholarship on ancient Sparta has to be conducted within the penumbra of the ‘mirage Spartiate’, a French term coined in 1933 to describe the problem posed by idealised accounts of Sparta.

Uncover the all-conquering Hun king whose nomadic horde terrorised Rome

Classical Greek and modern ideas of beauty