It would seem a pity to let the Ides pass without some comment. At the moment I am working on a paired biography of Antony and Cleopatra, but have not yet managed to kill off Caesar. As yet, we have only reached the end of the campaigns in Gaul and Antony's return to Rome to seek the post of augur and then tribune. The next chapter will return the focus to Cleopatra and deal with her father's final years and her elevation to co-ruler. So this time Caesar will live beyond the Ides. Anyway, it is tremendous fun to be back in the first century BC, and a lot of things have surprised me, especially about Mark Antony.

On another note, Spring's book mentioned a couple of entries ago lived up to its expectations. So did Babit's & Howard's book, which I am more than three quarters through. It is interesting to read that the famous story of Cornwallis ordering his gunners to fire into the combat involving the Guards, the 1st Maryland Regt. and Washington's Dragoons is probably a myth. The RA may have fired at some approaching dragoons, and hit the Guards as a result. So accidenatl rather than deliberate blue on blue.

I resolved from the start not to comment on current events. In any case the news of the last week or so seems to have been especially depressing. Still, hearing of such grim events helps to put in proper perspective the nervousness of an author waiting for reviews to appear.

This will be a bit of first, because I am recommending some books that are (a) not about ancient history and (b) not written by anyone I know. A couple of years I spent a few days at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia and managed to get down to Yorktown, which is bound to set an Englishman thinking! Anyway, it revived an old interest in the War of Independence/American Revolution. This was only reinforced by how often American reviewers and interviewers drew the parallel between Caesar and George Washington. It occurred to people often enough at the time, although Washington was equally often compared to Fabius Maxmimus cunctator, who saved Rome by avoiding battle.

A lot of my reading has been on the military side of things. There is a lot of terrific stuff on the subject. At the moment I am a few chapters into Matthew Spring's With Zeal and Bayonets Only: The British Army on campaign in North America, 1775-1783 and am enjoying it immensely. It is well worth anyone who wants to understand ancient battles looking at the mechanics of other conflicts fought at close range and by formations of men. Yesterday a copy of Lawrence Babits & Joshua Howard's Long, Obstinate, and Bloody: The Battle of Guilford Courthouse arrived from amazon. I am really looking forward to reading this, as Babit's A Devil of a whipping: The Battle of Cowpens (1998) is extremely good and was one of the first things I bought when I started reading up on the period. Sadly, the problem with researching and writing is that you do not get too much time to read for pleasure, so goodness knows how long it will be before I actually get a chance to look at it.