Pompeii — Mary Beard

Beard is as interested in what Pompeii cannot tell us as in what it can. The buried city has been producing confident assertions about Roman daily life for two centuries, and she subjects those assertions to pressure — asking how representative a single town really is, what excavators may have misread, and how Victorian and twentieth-century assumptions have shaped the conclusions drawn from the evidence. A sceptical, funny, and extremely well-informed guide.