Allan Massie
Pillaged People
Rome: A History in Seven Sackings
By Matthew Kneale
Atlantic Books 417pp £20 order from our bookshop
There’s an old saying, ‘One life isn’t enough for Rome.’ Matthew Kneale first visited the city when he was eight, nearly half a century ago. He has now lived there, lucky man, for fifteen years, in which time the desire to write its history has, one assumes, grown on him. But how to set about it? Rome’s history is overwhelming. In ancient times Romans dated their history ab urbe condita, 753 years before the Christian era. There was the Republic, the Empire and then the papacy, with 266 popes up to and including the present one – and that number doesn’t include all the antipopes. The city has grown and contracted and grown and contracted and grown again; selection is necessary. Kneale has found an elegant and effective path through the labyrinth: a ‘History in Seven Sackings’, ranging from 387 BC to 1944. It charts seven occasions when the city was attacked, occupied and terrorised by foreigners: Gauls, Goths, more Goths, Normans, Spaniards and Germans, French, and Germans again – seven sackings to match Rome’s seven hills.
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
We're delighted to be partnering the @royalacademy to offer one winner a year's free subscription to Literary Review and a year's RA Friends membership.
Enter by clicking the link below. You have until midday on 18th December - good luck!
http://ow.ly/XYXK50xrsRX
In Silenced Voices, @lucyjpop turns her attention to the journalist Svetlana Prokopyeva, and the historian and activist Yuri Dmitriev, both of whom have been 'imprisoned on trumped-up charges' in Russia.
http://ow.ly/MWow50xqJOC
https://literaryreview.co.uk/svetlana-prokopyeva-yuri-dmitriev
'His books ... seemed to anticipate the America that was throbbing all around me, with its violence and disappointments, its spiritual emptiness, its foolishness and its freaks.'
@PaulTheroux_ on the lure of Nathanael West.
http://ow.ly/WV2p50xrqOr