The gift that keeps on giving

You know how it is, you’re in a second-hand bookshop on a Saturday afternoon, indifferently leafing through anything that comes to hand and, for whatever reason, you suddenly fix on something that catches you’re attention. I picked up a copy of Content Provider: Selected Short Prose Pieces 2011-2016(2016, Faber & Faber) by the comedian Stewart Lee and noticed…

One for the poets

In the closing chapter of Augustus by John Williams, a novel I have just finished reading for the second time, I noticed yet another passage that I criminally overlooked on the first read. This quote appears in a letter written by the elderly and reflective emperor Octavius Caesar, to his friend, the historian and philosopher,…

The Romans and the Moralists

I am half way through rereading Augustus, a suberb novel by John Williams, author of the equally brilliant Stoner and Butcher’s Crossing, and noticed this particularly eloquent passage that I had overlooked the first time through. The quote is taken from a fictionalised 12BC letter from the political advisor Gaius Cilnius Maecenas to Titus Livius and…