They don't get better ..

... than this: The TLS blog: To pulp or to praise him? Divided views on Robert Hughes in Rome. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

We did not review it ourselves because it was, in one sense,absurd. As our classics editor Mary Beard pointed out in The Guardian, it deserved to be pulped for the extraordinary number of falsehoods and misunderstandings that it contained.

Despite being a paper much committed to Roman studies, there are many fine books which we cannot review each year. So why waste space, we thought, on one which, as a work of history was, for its first 200 pages at least, so full of error as to constitute a confidence trick on its purchasers?

I take Peter's word on this. His book, The Spartacus Road, is among the best I have read, history not as something grasped intellectually, but as something palpable and personal.