Dynasty

Critics Review

• Holland’s masterly account of this first wicked century of the Roman empire is, at its heart, a political analysis . . . the story he tells strides onwards across the landscape of grief and horror without pause or stutter . . . Holland is unshockable as he proceeds with breezy, clear-eyed analysis from one degrading display of cruelty and paranoia to the next . . . It is down to his skill as a storyteller that there’s no difficulty in imagining that it might all happen again tomorrow

  Sunday Times

• Deft and skilful . . . Among the many virtues of Tom Holland’s terrific history is that he does not shrink from seeing the Roman emperors for what they were: ‘the west’s primal examples of tyranny’ . . . Dynasty is both a formidable effort to compile what we can know about the ancient world and a sensational story

  Observer

• This is a wonderful, surging narrative – a brilliant and meticulous synthesis of the ancient sources . . . This is a story that should be read by anyone interested in history, politics or human nature – and it has never been better told

  Mail on Sunday

• This is history in which fact and fiction overlap, rigorously researched and lightened with dashes of humour . . . first-rate ancient history and a compulsively good read

  Daily Mail

• A swaggering history of the dynastic house that Julius Caesar built. Nothing entertains like excess and the weird cruelties, bloody intrigues and eye-popping depravities of emperors Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius and Nero are queasily fascinating

  Sunday Express

• A witty and skilful storyteller . . . He recounts with pleasure his racy tales of psychopathic cruelty, incest, paedophilia, matricide, fratricide, assassination and depravity

  New Statesman

• Brilliant, terrifying and compelling

  Observer

• A thrilling book by one of the country’s best popular historians . . . genuinely breathtaking

  History Today

• Holland has crafted a history of early Rome that has all the gripping detail and narrative momentum of a novel… he gives the reader a startlingly visceral sense of the violence and brutality and wretched excess of ancient Rome

  New York Times

• [A] dramatic, intrigue-ridden, blood-and-guts tale of Rome’s first line of emperors

  The Times

• Dynasty, like its companion volume Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic, is a fine example of narrative historical writing. Yet you could also read it as something else entirely: a meditation on the enduring power and possibilities of storytelling

  Financial Times

• Holland writes with all the excitement and immediacy of the gossip-mongers of Rome . . . One senses that if Tom Holland were emperor for the day he would give the crowd not only the bread and circuses but a jolly good education too

  Evening Standard

• A richly panoramic picture of Rome in the first century AD

  Literary Review

• Holland’s Tacitean vision of the dynasty of Augustus makes for a very compelling read

  Times Literary Supplement

• Holland is at the top of his game, blending deep scholarly skill with real literary talent

  Evening Standard

• Thrilling, thunderous prose, fully equal to that of the great days of Thermopylae and Salamis

  Wall Street Journal

• Holland is perhaps Britain’s most engrossing historical storyteller. He has a rare gift of combining academic respectability with a great knack as a narrator

  Catholic Herald

• This is great material, and Holland does it justice with a chiseled prose style and an eye for the luminous detail…. Holland is a master of narrative history. On the strength of Dynasty, he deserves a laurel wreath

  Washington Post

• A vivid account of five Roman emperors, emphasizing their vices and vicious behavior with less attention to the vast empire, which continued to prosper despite them

  Kirkus

• Dynasty has Holland’s usual novelistic ability to bring a narrative alive, together with his extraordinary command of ancient sources

  New York Times Book Review