FYAHMIX

Roman politics from the Gracchi in the second century BC to the launch of Augustus's principate in 27BC are formidably complicated. The stage is overcrowded and one scene follows another with bewildering speed. Although this is the best documented period in Roman history, interpretation can be difficult and scholars often cannot agree.Holland's approach is to combine academic accuracy with the language and simplifying energy of a tabloid reporter. He has an acute eye for the telling detail, as when he quotes a disappointed lover's dismissal of Clodia, a great but louche political lady, as being "in the dining-room a cock-teaser, in the bedroom an ice-block"; or notes that Alexandria was the first city to have numbered addresses and boasted slot machines and automatic doors (but he does not say how these worked).Holland sees through pretence.

"Pompey's shows of simplicity," he remarks astutely of a politician who understood the uses of spin, "were always ostentatious". On Augustus's clemency at the end of civil wars which few of the old ruling class survived, he cites Seneca's lethal jibe: "I am reluctant to call mercy what was really the exhaustion of cruelty."I have some cavils. No red-blooded red-top is frightened of a clich?and Holland has a weakness for such weary phrases as "glory days", "heady stuff", and the like. Sometimes Rubicon reads like history as told by the editor of The Sun. More significantly, in the search for a clear and exciting storyline, incidents of some importance are underplayed or omitted, and more made of others than the evidence allows.Caesar's unscrupulous prosecution of Rabirius, an inoffensive old senator, on a capital charge is not mentioned, although it was a key moment in his campaign against the Senate, and little account is given of the early career of the great but ferocious general, Marius. The teenage Mark Antony's alleged affair with a young noble is only a possibility when first described; but in later references innuendo slides into established fact.Also, some of the leading actors are painted with rather too broad a brush and lack the contradictions of real life.

Brutus appears in his Shakespearean guise as the noblest Roman of them all; no allusion is made to an embarrassing financial scam in which Cicero caught him out, nor to his tendency to align his conscience with his wishes. Bizarrely, Cato, that most principled but also most pig-headed of the Republic's defenders, is credited with "political acumen".None of this greatly matters. Our present is our past, and this gripping narrative resurrects some of the half-forgotten personalities and events that shaped who we are. In the light of the parallels between the two great imperial republics, it can be recommended as an instructive beach-read for senior politicians on both sides of the Atlantic.Anthony Everitt, author of 'Cicero: a turbulent life', is working on a biography of Augustus >. The small proportion of J M Coetzee's audience that subscribes to specialist literary magazines and takes an interest in academic conferences will have had the opportunity to read large chunks of Elizabeth Costello long before its appearance in hard covers. Chapters I and VI first saw the light in Salmagundi, while Chapter II will have been pored over by readers of "Occasional paper no. 17 of the Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of California at Berkeley" There are other such acknowledgments.