Christopher Kelly teaches classics and ancient history at Cambridge, where he is master of Corpus Christi College.
Once upon a time – and certainly before the Roman conquest – Britain was ruled by good King Lud. According to the utterly unreliable History of the Kings of Britain by the 12th-century Welsh cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth, Lud rebuilt the walls of London, ‘encircling it with countless towers. He also commanded the citizens to construct houses … so that no city in all...
High in the Pyrenees, early in the fifth century, a knot of Roman soldiers huddled together over the saddest kind of duty. A comrade-in-arms had died young, after just two years under the...
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