Water in the Roman World: engineering, trade, religion, and daily life

Review by Dylan K Rogers To say that the Roman world was overflowing with water is an understatement. Recently, scholarship has increasingly begun to explore the numerous ways water impacted the lives of ancient Romans, from understanding the design of aqueducts in the countryside to the social impact that fountains…

Asterix’s legacy at Alésia

Julius Caesar campaigned to conquer France for five years before the war of attrition reached its climax at Alésia. The patchwork quilt of tribal territories vacillated in their submission to the Romans.…

The Mosaics of Alexandria: pavements of Greek and Roman Egypt

Review by Helen Whitehouse Originally published in French (Mosaïques d’Alexandrie: pavements d’Égypte grecque et romaine, 2019), this handsome volume now appears in an excellent English translation by Colin Clement. Excavations in Alexandria, on land and at sea, over the last 40 years have revealed more material evidence of the Ptolemaic…

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Museum Review: Muckleburgh Military Collection

Open 10am-5pm daily (1 April to 30 October)Weybourne, Norfolk, NR25 7ERwww.muckleburgh.co.uk+ 44 (0)1263 588 210 The Muckleburgh Military Collection is the largest privately owned military museum in the United Kingdom. It was opened to the public in 1988 by Michael Savory and his father Squadron Leader Berry Savory, who had…

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Military history exhibitions, events, and festivals – March listings

Festivals IWM Duxford flying season: 50th anniversary April-October 2023IWM Duxford, Cambridgeshire, CB22 4QR, UKwww.iwm.org.uk/duxford-air-shows-50+44 (0)20 7416 5000 In the summer of 1973, ‘Duxford Air Day’ was first staged at the historic aerodrome in Cambridgeshire to celebrate the area’s aviation heritage. The event quickly became a permanent fixture, and it has…

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Film Review: Lebanon

Lebanon is a powerful vision of men at war, made real and intense by the fact that we never once move outside the tank, and only see the outside world from the interior.…

The Path of Peace: walking the Western Front Way

REVIEW by TOBY CLARK During the First World War, a young soldier called Douglas Gillespie used a letter home from the trenches to expound on an idea for remembering the dead after the fighting was over. Gillespie proposed a path from the English Channel to Switzerland, following the route of…

Dictionary of Fortifications

REVIEW by DAVID FLINTHAM Until relatively recently, there were more terms relating to fortifications than to probably any other area of military history. Confusion is easy, especially since many of the words and phrases come directly from languages other than English. Jean-Denis Lepage has set himself the challenge of identifying…

Demetrius: sacker of cities

REVIEW by MARC DeSANTIS The death of Alexander the Great in Babylon in 323 BC left the empire he had conquered without blood heirs ready to take up the heavy burden of governance. Thus, in the days following his passing, that task was left to a small group of Macedonian…

Mercy: humanity in war

REVIEW: CALUM HENDERSON The new German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, which arrived on Netflix last autumn, pulls no punches in its depiction of the savage violence of World War I. In the film, helpless young men are cut to pieces by machine-guns, buried…

Ireland and the Crusades

Review by Michael Potterton Thirty years ago, when I was a history and archaeology undergraduate at University College Dublin, the phrase ‘Ireland and the Crusades’ seemed almost as absurd as ‘Ireland and the Palaeolithic’ or ‘Ireland and the Renaissance’. Times change, of course, and thankfully all three have become fruitful…

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Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth and Reality

Ancient myths meet archaeological treasures in this new blockbuster at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Carly Hilts went along to learn more about the great palace at Knossos, legendary location of the Minotaur-haunted labyrinth, and real-life repository of Minoan culture.…

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