Dynasty — Tom Holland

Holland takes the Julio-Claudian emperors — Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero — as a collective subject, tracing the family through five reigns and examining how the imperial system shaped and was shaped by those who held it. The book is frank about the difficulty of the sources: Tacitus and Suetonius are brilliant but unreliable, and Holland is consistently alert to the gap between what was witnessed and what was written. What emerges is a portrait of a political system that selected for certain kinds of personality and produced others — in which the price of proximity to power was rarely survival.

'Tom Holland has a genius for making the ancient world vivid without falsifying it. Dynasty is his most gripping book yet.' — Evening Standard