The story of Rome’s richest man, who died a humiliating desert death in search of military glory   “A perfectly paced biography.�—Tom Holland, Times Literary Supplement   Marcus Licinius Crassus (115–53 BCE) was a modern man in an ancient world, a pioneer disrupter of finance and politics, and the richest man of the last years of the Roman republic. Without his catastrophic ambition, this trailblazing tycoon might have quietly entered history as Rome’s first modern political financier. Instead, Crassus and his son led an army on an unprovoked campaign against Parthia into what are now the borderlands of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, losing a battle at Carrhae which scarred Roman minds for generations.   After Crassus was killed, historians told many stories of his demise. Some said that his open mouth, shriveled by desert air, had been filled with molten gold as testament to his lifetime of greed. His story, skillfully told by Peter Stothard, poses both immediate and lasting questions about the intertwining of money, ambition, and power.

'Lets us see how power really worked, in public and private ... Stothard tells this story superbly' Dominic Sandbrook, SUNDAY TIMES 14 CE: The first Roman emperor is dead. A second is about to succeed. The Forum of Rome, once fought over so fiercely, has become hardly more than a museum. The house of all power is up above on the Palatine Hill, about to become the birthplace of Western bureaucracy, a warren of banqueting and bedrooms, a treacherous household where it takes special talents to survive. This is a Roman history with a cast of new men and newly dominant women, those reviled too often in the past as flatterers and gluttons, uppity slaves and former slaves, lawyers-for-hire, chancer arrivistes and unhinged party animals. Palatine uncovers the lives of the Vitellii, perhaps Rome's least admired imperial clan, of Publius, an old-fashioned soldier snared in the politics of the new age, of Lucius, an exceptionally skilled and sycophantic courtier, and of Aulus a genial sluggard whose prowess at the table carries him all the way to the throne before collapsing his family's reputation for ever. Few now remember them. Yet in their creeping ascent to the very summit of the imperial hierarchy lie neglected truths about a lasting legacy of Rome.

'Lets us see how power really worked, in public and private ... Stothard tells this story superbly' Dominic Sandbrook, SUNDAY TIMES 14 CE: The first Roman emperor is dead. A second is about to succeed. The Forum of Rome, once fought over so fiercely, has become hardly more than a museum. The house of all power is up above on the Palatine Hill, about to become the birthplace of Western bureaucracy, a warren of banqueting and bedrooms, a treacherous household where it takes special talents to survive. This is a Roman history with a cast of new men and newly dominant women, those reviled too often in the past as flatterers and gluttons, uppity slaves and former slaves, lawyers-for-hire, chancer arrivistes and unhinged party animals. Palatine uncovers the lives of the Vitellii, perhaps Rome's least admired imperial clan, of Publius, an old-fashioned soldier snared in the politics of the new age, of Lucius, an exceptionally skilled and sycophantic courtier, and of Aulus a genial sluggard whose prowess at the table carries him all the way to the throne before collapsing his family's reputation for ever. Few now remember them. Yet in their creeping ascent to the very summit of the imperial hierarchy lie neglected truths about a lasting legacy of Rome.

The story of Rome's richest man, who died a humiliating desert death in search of military glory "A perfectly paced biography."-Tom Holland, Times Literary Supplement Marcus Licinius Crassus (115-53 BCE) was a modern man in an ancient world, a pioneer disrupter of finance and politics, and the richest man of the last years of the Roman republic. Without his catastrophic ambition, this trailblazing tycoon might have quietly entered history as Rome's first modern political financier. Instead, Crassus and his son led an army on an unprovoked campaign against Parthia into what are now the borderlands of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, losing a battle at Carrhae which scarred Roman minds for generations. After Crassus was killed, historians told many stories of his demise. Some said that his open mouth, shriveled by desert air, had been filled with molten gold as testament to his lifetime of greed. His story, skillfully told by Peter Stothard, poses both immediate and lasting questions about the intertwining of money, ambition, and power.

For thirty extraordinary days, in March and April 2003, Tony Blair defied street protests, party revolts, allied anger and government resignations in order to send British troops to Iraq to oust Saddam Hussein.
What was it like inside Downing Street during that time? What was it like while the Prime Minister risked his job for such an unpopular cause? Why did he do it? Peter Stothard, who for a month was given unprecedented access to shadow almost every move the Prime Minister made, gives a unique view from the inside.
From the 'den' of Ten Downing Street to the back corridors of the House of Commons, through councils of war in the Azores, recriminations in Brussels, personal diplomacy in Belfast and Camp David, this book takes us backstage. 30 Days throws an intimate - and frequently humorous - light on the domestic and political life of Number Ten at a time of crisis; it shows the Prime Minister's relationships not only with the President of the United States but with the writers, strategists, make-up artists and other members of the close-knit Number Ten team. It illuminates his frankest dealings with the world leaders who both backed and opposed him.
Peter Stothard's fast-paced and compelling narrative is supported by Nick Danziger's remarkable photographs. The result is a groundbreaking record of history in the making, and a gripping day-to-day chronicle of four tense and tempestuous weeks.

In this inspiring and original book, former editor of The Times, Sir Peter Stothard, re-traces the journey taken by Spartacus and his army of rebels. In the final century of the first Roman Republic an army of slaves brought a peculiar terror to the people of Italy. Its leaders were gladiators. Its purpose was incomprehensible. Its success was unprecedented. The Spartacus Road is the route along which this rebel army outfought the Roman legions between 73 and 71 BC, bringing both fears and hopes that have never wholly left the modern mind. It is a road that stretches through 2,000 miles of Italian countryside and out into 2,000 years of world history. In this inspiring and original memoir, the former editor of The Times, Peter Stothard, takes us on an extraordinary journey. The result is a book like none other - at once a journalist's notebook, a classicist's celebration, a survivor's record of a near fatal cancer and the history of a unique and brutal war. As he travels along the Spartacus road - through the ruins of Capua to Vesuvius and the lost Greek cities of the Italian south - Stothard's prose illuminates conflicting memories of times ancient and modern, the simultaneously foreign and familiar, one of the greatest stories of all ages. Sweepingly erudite and strikingly personal, On the Spartacus Road is non-fiction writing of the highest order.

'Lets us see how power really worked, in public and private ... Stothard tells this story superbly' Dominic Sandbrook, SUNDAY TIMES 14 CE: The first Roman emperor is dead. A second is about to succeed. The Forum of Rome, once fought over so fiercely, has become hardly more than a museum. The house of all power is up above on the Palatine Hill, about to become the birthplace of Western bureaucracy, a warren of banqueting and bedrooms, a treacherous household where it takes special talents to survive. This is a Roman history with a cast of new men and newly dominant women, those reviled too often in the past as flatterers and gluttons, uppity slaves and former slaves, lawyers-for-hire, chancer arrivistes and unhinged party animals. Palatine uncovers the lives of the Vitellii, perhaps Rome's least admired imperial clan, of Publius, an old-fashioned soldier snared in the politics of the new age, of Lucius, an exceptionally skilled and sycophantic courtier, and of Aulus a genial sluggard whose prowess at the table carries him all the way to the throne before collapsing his family's reputation for ever. Few now remember them. Yet in their creeping ascent to the very summit of the imperial hierarchy lie neglected truths about a lasting legacy of Rome.

'A gripping history' Mary Beard 'A political thriller, and a human story that astonishes' Hilary Mantel 'Atmospheric and gripping, and [his] scholarship is impeccable' Greg Woolf Many men killed Julius Caesar. Only one man was determined to kill the killers. THE LAST ASSASSIN dazzlingly charts an epic turn of history through the eyes of an unheralded man. It is a hunt that an emperor wanted to hide, of torture and terror, politics and poetry, of ideas and their consequences, a gripping story of fear, revenge and survival.

For thirty days I was close by him at historic events -- in the places where writers never are.

Before Britain could help the United States in the war against Saddam Hussein, Tony Blair faced a battle against his own voters, his own party, and his own allies in Europe. These were among the most tense and tumultuous weeks the world had seen since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In thirty days, Blair took on his opponents and won.

Through it all, Peter Stothard had unprecedented access to Blair -- from Ten Downing Street and the House of Commons through the war summits in the Azores, Brussels, Belfast, and at Camp David. Stothard brings us inside the corridors of power during this extraordinary time, offering a vivid, up-close view of an enormously popular leader facing the challenge of his life.

Many men killed Julius Caesar. Only one man was determined to kill the killers. From the spring of 44 BC through one of the most dramatic and influential periods in history, Caesar's adopted son, Octavian, the future Emperor Augustus, exacted vengeance on the assassins of the Ides of March, not only on Brutus and Cassius, immortalized by Shakespeare, but all the others too, each with his own individual story. The last assassin left alive was one of the lesser-known: Cassius Parmensis was a poet and sailor who chose every side in the dying Republic's civil wars except the winning one, a playwright whose work was said to have been stolen and published by the man sent to kill him. Parmensis was in the back row of the plotters, many of them Caesar's friends, who killed for reasons of the highest political principles and lowest personal piques. For fourteen years he was the most successful at evading his hunters but has been barely a historical foot note--until now. The Last Assassin dazzlingly charts an epic turn of history through the eyes of an unheralded man. It is a history of a hunt that an emperor wanted to hide, of torture and terror, politics and poetry, of ideas and their consequences, a gripping story of fear, revenge, and survival.

Finding himself in Alexandria in the winter of 2010, Peter Stothard, editor of the TLS and former editor of The Times, is forced to contemplate his past in circumstances he does not expect. The aftermath of a bombing and the onset of the Arab Spring place obstacles in his plans to complete a long-delayed biography of Cleopatra. Minded by two guides, whose motives are mixed and mysterious, he visits Alexandria's ancient sites and revisits places and people from his own life, an Essex childhood among military engineers, Latin and Greek at Oxford and journalism high and low in London. In this extraordinary book, part memoir and part travel literature, written against the background of the fracturing police state of Egypt, a man and a woman from the author's school days are as pressing as the political minders of today.