Beard tells this story precisely and clearly, with passion and without technical jargon...SPQR is a grim success story, but one told with wonderful flair. -- Greg Woolf - Wall Street Journal
Though she here claims that 50 years of training and study have led up to SPQR, Beard wears her learning lightly. As she takes us through the brothels, bars, and back alleys where the populus Romanus left their imprint, one senses, above all, that she is having fun. -- James Romm - New Republic
By the time Beard has finished, she has explored not only archaic, republican, and imperial Rome, but the eastern and western provinces over which it eventually won control...She moves with ease and mastery though archaeology, numismatics, and philology, as well as a mass of written documents on stone and papyrus. -- G. W. Bowersock - New York Review of Books
In SPQR, her wonderful concise history, Mary Beard unpacks the secrets of the city's success with a crisp and merciless clarity that I have not seen equaled anywhere else. -- Ferdinand Mount - New York Times Book Review
Beard does precisely what few popularizers dare to try and plenty of dons can't pull off: She conveys the thrill of puzzling over texts and events that are bound to be ambiguous, and she complicates received wisdom in the process. Her magisterial new history of Rome, SPQR...is no exception.... The ancient Romans, Beard shows, are relevant to people many centuries later who struggle with questions of power, citizenship, empire, and identity. -- Emily Wilson - The Atlantic
A masterful new chronicle.... Beard is a sure-footed guide through arcane material that, in other hands, would grow tedious. Sifting myth from fact in dealing with the early history of the city, she enlivens-and deepens-scholarly debates by demonstrating how the Romans themselves shaped their legendary beginnings to short-term political ends.... Exemplary popular history, engaging but never dumbed down, providing both the grand sweep and the intimate details that bring the distant past vividly to life. -- The Economist
