“... voodoo Macbeth in Harlem. Over the next few years, the Mercury Players would mount productions of Julius Caesar, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, The Cradle Will Rock, Danton’s Death and Native Son. Together with the Group Theater, they were the nerve power of the New York stage in the 1930s and early 1940s. There is a line more traceable than is sometimes ...”

“... deemed the most desirable of women, was the mother of four children, one, she claimed, by Julius Caesar and the three youngest by Mark Antony, something most representations of Cleopatra conspire not to remember or talk about (no one I have mentioned this to had the faintest idea she was a mother). In fact the silence began with Octavian in a bid ...”

“... perceptions, say of printed letters, to terminate with a belief in some historical event, such as Julius Caesar’s murder. It is the present impression that stops the regress: the historical event is the first link of the chain. The argument should be that eye-witnesses of Caesar’s murder passed the information on ...”

“... irritating. She would quote Shakespeare in a loud voice and make you listen. Sometimes she was Julius Caesar, sometimes Cassio, sometimes Iago and often Othello. You had to stand there and wait until she was finished. The speeches were often long and accompanied by many gestures. She knew these plays because she had seen them acted by Anew McMaster ...”

“... just before she died and thought she looked a bit like Gertrude Stein: stocky, impassive, the same Julius Caesar haircut – only dreamier, blue-eyed, more aerated somehow. Her emotional remoteness seemed absolute.Yet Martin’s story has always enthralled me. Born in rural Saskatchewan in 1912, she moved to New York in the 1940s to study art at ...”

“... dukes of Ferrara derived from Carolingian knights was no more fanciful than the idea that Augustus Caesar derived from Trojan exiles.) The prestige of Orlando Furioso is enhanced by analogy with the Aeneid; the prestige of the house of Este is enhanced by comparison with Augustus, the Julio-Claudian dynasty and the Roman Empire. But the analogies involved ...”

“... 180s, Severus commanded a legion in Syria, where he encountered Heliogabalus’ great-grandfather Julius Bassianus of Emesa – modern Homs – in the upper Orontes valley. Originally an Arab foundation, Emesa had a long history of friendly relations with Rome under its native dynasty and, after its absorption into the empire, remained the hinge between the ...”

“... and disbanded, or wiped out in the field, in the battles that brought the Republic down. In 30 BC, Julius Caesar’s grand-nephew Octavian, having eliminated every one of his rivals, inherited an exhausted world gasping for peace. He also inherited hundreds of thousands of men still under arms, not least his own and Mark Antony’s praetorian cohorts. He ...”

“... the inscriptions that record them provide a narrative that runs in parallel to the histories of Caesar, Tacitus and their successors. They document the lives of ordinary people, slaves and centurions, potters and graffiti writers. Roman tombs have given us the first named face in Britain, the first named woman and the first self-proclaimed Londoner. The ...”

“... From 1930 on came a great rash of prison movies and a new genre of gangster movies such as Little Caesar (1930, with Edward G. Robinson) and Public Enemy (1931, with James Cagney), in which the Capone-like celebrity gangster was the star and the Police were depicted as impotent or simply absent: Hollywood morality insisted that the gangster got killed, but ...”

“... teacher who assured me that if I did what in fact I never did, and applied myself thoroughly to Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico (‘Concentrate, Hitchens’), I would discover that most of the great general’s lauded victories were the anxious outcome of self-inflicted defeats. Since Caesar relied so heavily on ...”

“... limited repertoire of forenames (praenomina) such as Gaius, Lucius, Marcus; then a family name, Julius, Aemilius, Tullius; and finally a cognomen, Caesar, Paullus, Cicero. With Roman citizenship Greeks acquired Roman names, often using a form of the name of the reigning emperor, sponsor or benefactor while retaining their ...”