Pompeii - Mary Beard Kartoniert (TB)

'Much of what you think you know about Pompeii may turn out on reading this eye-opening book to be wrong. The town was not full of brothels (Beard counts only one) its water engineering pace the novelist Robert Harris was pretty substandard (there may have been aqueducts but there were no sewers) and the site didn't lie undisturbed until the eighteenth century (many townspeople for instance came back soon afterwards to dig up their valuables). Beard a professor of classics at Cambridge always wears her learning lightly and in this outstanding book she has excelled herself puncturin g preconceptions and exposing a whole layer of myth about the world's best-preserved ancient town. The result is an often gripping piece of detective work that also offers a tantalising window into the reality of daily Roman life.' The Sunday Times History books of the year Andrew Holgate