Book review: 'For 20 years, they rule the world together'

‘Agrippa’ by Robert Harris

Hbk, Hutchinson, £22

Julius Caesar is dead, and the lives of two teenage boys are to irrevocably change.

One is Caesar’s 17-year-old heir and nephew. The other is Octavius’s closest friend, Agrippa. To claim Octavius’s inheritance, they must fight the giant figures of the Roman Empire – and, against all odds, they win.

Octavius becomes the Emperor Augustus. For 20 years, they rule the world together. Now Agrippa is 50. Ailing and alone, betrayed by his wife’s infidelity, he takes refuge in his house on the Bay of Naples and begins to write his memoirs.

From his earliest meetings with Julius Caesar, through the epic conflict with Mark Antony and Cleopatra, the great naval battle of Actium and the endless wars to expand the empire, he describes how one man has dominated his life: the cunning, ruthless, unknowable Octavius. When it comes to power, does friendship exist at all?

‘Domesday’ by Max Adams

Hbk, Head Zeus, £25

Take an historical stroll - 1,000 miles on foot through the England of the Norman Conquest.

The Domesday Book describes the furniture of a culture and its economy – the legacy of Anglo-Saxon England. When King William I sent his agents to survey every shire in England, he asked them to list his holdings and calculate what was owed to him.

The manuscript record of the resulting ‘Great Survey’ is not only a tax record, but a unique window onto the structure of English administration and economy before and immediately after the Norman Conquest: its shires and hundreds, acres, hides and townships.

In Domesday, Max Adams re-treads the path taken in 1085 by those agents, taking us to the very sites covered by one of the most iconic documents of English history. This book paints a unique portrait of a land and its people, bringing the past to life.