'Dennison excels at exploring the iconography of Livia... his analysis is exemplary... Balanced, scholarly and yet accessible, this is very good history indeed.' Country Life. 'A fine biography of Rome's first Empress, who is now embedded in the public consciousness as portrayed by Robert Graves and Sian Phillips. The author reassesses that sensational version with commonsense and sympathy. He has produced a scholarly but highly accessible book about the woman who - through chance, dress, behaviour and her own undeniable determination - was able to make the Empire her own.' Lindsey Davis. 'A powerful new life of Livia... refreshingly free of cant' The Herald. '[This] book is something of a triumph... Dennison knows the boundaries between story-telling and history, and sensibly restricts himself to asking the appropriate questions... That is the way to bring Livia to life, and Dennison does it tactfully and well.' The Tablet. 'Dennison's entertainingly brisk biography comes gallantly to the rescue of a lady whose finger-prints have been found, or planted, on the scene of all manner of suspicious deaths.' --The Spectator. 'For the wife of a Caesar, opportunities were often hard to distinguish from pitfalls. No one better illustrates this than the subject of Matthew Dennison's learned, engrossing and pacey new biography... Dennison combines a healthy scepticism towards his sources with an alertness to all that made the career of his heroine authentically remarkable... His achievement, in this consistently entertaining biography, is to remind us that a politician with a clever and supportive wife is a fortunate man indeed.' Tom Holland, Mail on Sunday. 'Matthew Dennison's rich and compelling account challenges the accepted version of Augustus's wife as the viper in the nest... What emerges is a broader and thoroughly compelling account of the beginning of the Julio-Claudian dynasty as it seized and maintained power for itself and the empire. Dennison possesses the magical ability to make us see that the Romans were like us. They laughed at new money, sniggered over sexual misdemeanours, bore petty grudges. They had laws, baths, literature and a disciplined army. And yet they were almost unimaginably different. Dennison recreates ancient Rome and the mindset of its inhabitants as an alien world. It is a city conveyed through the senses, beginning with a marvelous account of the birth of a child into an elite family against a background of smoke, sacrifice, and the melting wax of ancestral masks.' Financial Times.
