At nineteen, I was practically Christian. No sex, no drugs, a lot of desperate hopes that didn’t seem so different from prayers: to be normal, to be smart—above all, to be good. I owned multiple translations of the Bible.
In reality, I wasn’t religious; I was just afraid. I’d seen friends get drunk or fall in love, and their altered states made me all the more careful about maintaining the stasis of my own. I skipped parties. I did my homework. (The Bibles were assigned reading.) As soon as a boy I liked liked me back—never mind, no, I didn’t. “Goodness” was a vague idea in my head—no one had ever told me precisely what it meant—so I made up the rules and granted myself the satisfaction of never breaking them.
Amy Twigg’s striking debut offers a new twist on the cult narrative. Rather than focusing on a charismatic male leader, Spoilt Creatures (the title comes from a letter Vita Sackville-West wrote to Virginia Woolf) is about one woman’s sway over a feminist commune buried in the Kent countryside.
There are few concepts as resonant as “Roman road”. The words ooze purpose, chutzpah and superiority. Catherine Fletcher’s epic study unpacks every aspect of the subject: from the roads’ construction and military importance to their hold over our imaginations and those of imperialist imitators. “They offer a lesson in the exercise of power across the centuries,” she writes.
It’s estimated there were a total of around 100,000km of Roman roads. Fletcher travels across 14 countries to trace the routes and the reasons for their existence: Cicero suggested that they bound states together through “alliance, friendship, covenant, agreement, treaty”, but they were also, of course, military supply lines for the suppression of rebels.