Ancient history

The St. Brice’s Day Massacre? I must admit I hadn’t heard of this “most just extermination” of Danes in Oxford at the instigation of King Aethelred the Unready in 1002, perhaps because the teaching of history in Britain tends to kick off in 1066. You certainly don’t think of Oxford as a place that pioneered techniques of ethnic cleansing. Crypt is a collection of seven essays that unearth details about how certain people lived and died in the past. If you didn’t already know Alice Roberts’s background as an anatomist and biological anthropologist, you’d have a good chance of deducing it from this book.

The Roman emperor Domitian began life as a spare. At the end of the first century CE, while his brother Titus was the heir to their father Vespasian, the younger boy’s “sense of resentment and frustration had festered,” writes Tom Holland. “Rather than stay in Rome, where his lack of meaningful responsibility was inevitably felt as something raw,” Domitian moved away with a wife whom his family disliked, “doomed forever to be a supernumerary,” paranoid, attracting gossip, avoiding any company in which “innocent mention of baldness” might be viewed as “mockery of his own receding hairline.” In most judgments by posterity this Prince Harry of the early empire fulfilled all this lack of early promise. Big brother Titus became emperor only briefly.