William Dalrymple has a marvellous ability to write history that reads like a novel. This book is a narrative adventure in which he writes about the British in India during the 18th century, the relationship that soldiers and officers of the East India Company had with the people of India, Hindu and Muslim that they lived among. This was a time when they made an effort to learn Indian languages, understand the customs and the culture, take on local ways of living and being, and assimilated in more ways than one...

The Swerve is a book about a book, On the Nature of Things by Lucretius, a work of philosophy that attempts to explain the nature of the world that we live in, and tries to lay out what it is that makes for a good human life. This was a work that was well known in Ancient Greece, but was since lost. It was rediscovered six hundred years ago, at a time when most of the wisdom and knowledge of the ancient word had been lost....and it became one of the many forces that inspired the renaissance...

Mary Beard is one of Britain's most prominent classical scholars and public intellectuals. She’s one of those rare people who seems as much at home in academia as she is in front of a television camera. She's a rigorous scholar who has a real talent for public engagement and is never afraid to challenge received wisdom whether it is about the ancient world or about the modern one.