How to plan the ultimate English road trip

Huge excitement last week, as archaeologists announced the discovery in Southwark of the best preserved Roman mausoleum ever found in Britain. I heard the news on the radio while driving with a friend, and both of us – living as we do south of the river – cheered. Shortly afterwards, I was invited on to the World Service to talk about Roman London. No sooner had the presenter introduced me than he was demanding to know about the mausoleum. I felt a lurch of horror. I realised I knew nothing, absolutely nothing about the mausoleum beyond what I had heard on the radio. ‘What did it look like?’ the presenter pressed. What to say? That it was big? Small? Mausoleum-y? In the event, I decided that honesty was the best policy. I put my hands up. I confessed my ignorance. It is almost always the cover-up, after all, rather than the event that causes trouble.

The Romans are much on my mind. Early next month sees the publication of my new book about the heyday of the Roman peace: the age of the building of the Colosseum and Hadrian’s Wall, and the destruction of Jerusalem and Pompeii. It is the third in a series of histories of the Roman Empire, the first of which – Rubicon, about the age of Julius Caesar – I wrote more than 20 years ago, during the first presidency of George W. Bush and the aftermath of 9/11. Back then it was the parallels between the two imperial republics, the Roman and the American, that most struck me. Chapter headings in Rubicon included ‘The War on Terror’ and ‘Known Unknowns’. Now, however, when I look at the Roman Empire, I see, not a distant mirror, but a world incalculably stranger and more alien than I had properly comprehended two decades ago.