Colosseum

The Colosseum was Imperial Rome's monument to warfare. Like a cathedral of death it towered over the city and invited its citizens, 50,000 at a time, to watch murderous gladiatorial games. It is now visited by two million visitors a year (Hitler was among them). Award winning classicist, Mary Beard with Keith Hopkins, tell the story of Rome's greatest arena: how it was built; the gladiatorial and other games that were held there; the training of the gladiators; the audiences who revelled in the games, the emperors who staged them and the critics. And the strange after story - the Colosseum has been fort, store, church, and glue factory.

Brilliant ... arguably the best so far in Profile's excellent Wonders of the World series ... it brings the Colosseum to life in all its gory splendour., A work of scholarship written with the general reader in mind ... a pleasure to read., What the authors have given us in the proverbial multum in parvo, Revels in the accretions of detail and myth ... first-class scholarship and an engagingly demotic style, Stirring stuff! This is a welcome and well-written book ... it reassesses myths, politely debunks many misconceptions about what we know- and what we don't know - to put the fabulous monument in context from its founding to the present.

KEITH HOPKINS was Professor of Ancient History at Cambridge and Vice-Provost of King's College.MARY BEARD is Professor of Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and the classics editor of the TLS. Her books include the acclaimed The Roman Triumph and The Parthenon (in the Wonders of the World series of which she is general editor). She is also the award winning author of Pompeii, which was a BBC documentary.