The Histories

Apr 18, 2025 4:09 PM

Author:Tacitus,Rhiannon Ash

The Histories

In AD68 Nero's suicide marked the end of the first dynasty of imperial Rome. The following year was one of drama and danger, though not of chaos.

In the surviving books of his Histories the barrister-historian Tacitus, writing some thirty years after the events he describes, gives us a detailed account based on excellent authorities. In the 'long but single year' of revolution four emperors emerge in succession: Galba, Otho, Vitellius and Vespasian - who established the Flavian dynasty.

Rhiannon Ash stays true to the spirit of Wellesley's prose whilst making the translation more accessible to modern readers.

Reviews

Utterly captivating... brings to life both Lucie and the glorious and terrible years through which she lived with a novelistic vividness, full of sights and sounds and flavours

—— Sunday Times

A scintillating biography...Moorehead succeeds triumphantly [and] brings an assured grip on contemporary politics and a colourful sense of place

—— Daily Telegraph

A rich and satisfying book which not only adds to our appreciation of Madame de la Tour du Pin's story but brings the whole tumultuous period and its characters to life

—— Spectator

Lucie de la Tour de Pin has found a biographer worthy of her own storytelling skills. With a light-handed touch, Moorehead sets Lucie's story in its wider social and historical context, sketching the complicated political twists and turns in a way that makes them memorable without ever dumbing down

—— Kathryn Hughes , Mail on Sunday

Never less than a gripping story of an extraordinary life

—— Literary Review

Here is the latest from Caroline Moorhead whose work is never less than rigorously and beautifully composed

—— Daily Express

Moorehead has an eye for the detail... The book sparkles with gems about life at the court of Marie-Antoinette

—— Hugh MacDonald , The Herald

romantic adventure, staged in colourful historical settings...moral tale

—— Biancamaria Fontana , Times Literary Supplement

The attraction of Moorehead's biography lies in her seamless fusion of Lucie's warm subjectivity with a broad historical canvas of bitter turmoil.

—— Siofra Pierse , Irish Times

comprehensive and absorbing biography

—— Clare Colvin , Independent

An excellent, lively biography, full of background detail

—— Standpoint

Moorehead's biography, drawing on a trove of previously unpublished correspondence, captures the rhythm of the radical contrasts in her subject's like

—— The New Yorker

This utterly captivating biography brings to life, with novelistic vividness, both Lucie [de la Tour du Pin] and the glorious and terrible years through which she lived

—— Christopher Hart , The Sunday Times

It's not uncommon to enjoy a novel and want to read more novels by that author; it's less common to think the same about a biography, but after reading Dancing to the Precipice, I definitely want to read more biographies by Moorhead

—— Brandon Robshaw , Independent on Sunday

It is in describing Lucie's world in this biography so admirably succeeds

—— Contemporary Reviews

Enthralling look at the sharp-eyed 19th-century memoirist Lucie de la Tour du Pin.

—— Sunday Times Summer Reading

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