Extortion

This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length. It has the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book. (‘Built in 1923 and originally known as the Empire Stadium, Wembley was the most iconic sporting ground in Britain.’) But it occurred to me more than once as I read it that it has the hallmarks of a particularly black London comedy by Dickens or Ben Jonson or Joe Orton. A violent knave, his activities previously limited to cheating the police, murdering his equally appalling criminal rivals, doing underhand deals and

It is rare to read a book about Cicero that likens its hero to a demagogue. Rome’s prosecutor of conspiracy and corruption in the last years of the Republic is seen more commonly as a toga-draped crusader for virtue. Was he also a ranter steeped in violence, crude character-assassination, tendentious storytelling and racial stereotypes? Yes, argues Josiah Osgood, an American historian, whose book persuasively analyses a range of Cicero’s murder, fraud and extortion cases. Other men of the time were often no better, he writes, but, echoing Michelle Obama on Donald Trump: ‘Fortunately for Cicero, if his opponents went low, he knew how to go even lower.’ The defender of