A stunning elegy to a vanished time, Caroline Heller’s memoir traces the lives of her parents, her uncle, and their circle of intellectuals and dreamers from Central Europe on the eve of World War II to present-day America. In this unforgettable dual memoir of her parents’ lives and her own, Caroline Heller brings to life the lost world of European café culture, and reminds us of the sustaining power of literature in the most challenging of times. Heller vividly evokes prewar Prague, where her parents lived, loved, and studied. Her mother, Liese Florsheim, was a young German refugee initially drawn to Erich Heller, a bright but detached intellectual, rather than to his brother, Paul. As Hitler’s power spreads and World War II becomes inevitable, their world is destroyed and they must flee the country and continent. Paul, who will eventually become the author’s father, is trapped and sent to Buchenwald, where he survives under hellish conditions. Though Paul’s life nearly ends in Europe, he reunites with Liese in the United States, where they marry. Their daughter Caroline, restless and insecure, carries the trauma of her parents’ story with her, but her quest to make peace with her heritage is eased by her love of books and writers, part of her family legacy. Through the darkest years of Hitler’s rule, Caroline’s parents and uncle had turned time and time again to literature to help them survive—and so she does as well. Written with sensitivity and grace, Reading Claudius is a profound meditation on the ways we strive to solve the mysteries of our pasts, and a window into understanding the ones we love. Praise for Reading Claudius “This fine book contains moments of emotion so pure that in the end, we too fall in love with the writer’s past.”—The New York Times Book Review “Heller plunges us lovingly and convincingly into [a] lost world.”—The Boston Globe “Caroline Heller writes with both honesty and delicacy. I was particularly enthralled by her finely drawn portrait of prewar Central Europe: a lost world whose memories are inestimably valuable and fiercely beautiful but which, without accounts like this, would fade forever.”—Anne Fadiman, author of The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down “Reading Claudius is much more than a work of riveting personal history. It is a feat of passionate, radical integrity. Caroline Heller has wedded the greatest level of care in her scholarship to an even deeper form of search: that in which imagination becomes not only an act of love but an instrument of truth.”—Leah Hager Cohen, author of No Book but the World and The Grief of Others “A deeply felt and deeply thought memoir, it manages to unearth a whole lost world with aching tenderness and regret.”—Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head From the Hardcover edition.

“One of the really remarkable books of our day”—the story of the Roman emperor on which the award-winning BBC TV series was based (The New York Times). Once a rather bookish young man with a limp and a stammer, a man who spent most of his time trying to stay away from the danger and risk of the line of ascension, Claudius seemed an unlikely candidate for emperor. Yet, on the death of Caligula, Claudius finds himself next in line for the throne, and must stay alive as well as keep control. Drawing on the histories of Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus, noted historian and classicist Robert Graves tells the story of the much-maligned Emperor Claudius with both skill and compassion. Weaving important themes throughout about the nature of freedom and safety possible in a monarchy, Graves’s Claudius is both more effective and more tragic than history typically remembers him. A bestselling novel and one of Graves’ most successful, I, Claudius has been adapted to television, film, theatre, and audio. “[A] legendary tale of Claudius . . . [A] gem of modern literature.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From bestselling author Douglas Jackson, a gripping and visceral novel of the Roman invasion of Britain, for fans of Conn Iggulden and Simon Scarrow. "What stands out are Jackson's superb battle scenes. I lost myself in the riveting depictions of combat . . . I was gripped from start to finish." -- Ben Kane. "You will be reading this and saying to yourself, "Just one more page!"..." - ***** Reader review. "THIS is the story I was waiting on!" - ***** Reader review. ******************************************************************** EMPEROR OF ROME. CONQUEROR OF BRITAIN. 43 AD. Southern England. Caratacus, war chief of the Britons, watches as the scarlet cloaks of the Roman legions spread across his lands like blood. In Rome, Emperor Claudius desires total conquest and dreams of taking his place in history alongside his illustrious forebears Caesar and Augustus. Among the legions marches Rufus, keeper of the Emperor's elephant. War is coming and the united tribes of Britain will make a desperate stand against the might of Rome in their fight for freedom. The Emperor has a very special purpose for Rufus and his elephant in the midst of the battle - will the Gods favour him? Have you read Caligula - where Rufus's adventures begin?

Based on the life of Claudius, Emperor of Rome.

Claudius became emperor after the assassination of Caligula, and was deified by his successor Nero in AD 54. Opinions of him have varied greatly over succeeding centuries, but he has mostly been caricatured as a reluctant emperor, hampered by a speech impediment, who preferred reading to ruling. Barbara Levick's authoritative study reassesses the reign of Claudius, examining his political objectives and activities within the constitutional, political, social and economic development of Rome. Out of Levick's critical scrutiny of the literary, archaeological and epigraphic sources emerges a different Claudius - an intelligent politician, ruthlessly determined to secure his position as ruler. A history of political and domestic intrigue, as well as an investigation into the development and limits of imperial power, this study is essential reading for historians of the Roman Empire.

A lush, gripping, psychologically complex novel that asks: How much do siblings owe one another? At the edge of a woods, on the grounds of a defunct “free school,” Ava and her brother, Fred, share a dreamy and seemingly idyllic childhood—a world defined largely by their imaginations, a celebration of curiosity and the natural environment, and each other’s presence. Their parents, progressive educators, believe passionately that children develop best without formal instruction or societal constraint. Everyone is aware of Fred’s oddness—the word “autism” is whispered—but his parents’ fierce disapproval of labels keeps him free of clinical evaluation, diagnosis, or intervention, and constantly at Ava’s side. Decades later, Fred is arrested for a shocking crime, and Ava is frantic to piece together the story of what actually happened. A boy is dead. Fred is held in a county jail. But could he really have done what he’s accused of? By now their parents are long gone, and the siblings have fallen out of touch, which causes Ava considerable guilt. Who is left to reach Fred? To explain him and his innocence to the world? Convinced that she alone can ensure he is regarded with sympathy, Ava tells their enthralling story. A writer of enormous craft, Leah Hager Cohen brings her trademark intelligence and storytelling to a psychologically gripping, richly ambiguous novel that suggests we may ultimately understand one another best not with facts alone, but through our imaginations.

A study of the reign of Claudius (AD 41-54), exploring what it can tell us about the developing Roman Empire.

The Old English Hexateuch is a manuscript of the earliest vernacular translation of the Old Testament books of Genesis through Joshua. The texts belong, in part, to the Anglo-Saxon monk Aelfric (950?-1010?) and to several anonymous translators and at least one artist who compiled these translations and illustrated them with nearly four hundred narrative images, which are carefully integrated into the manuscript. The Hexateuch testifies to the creativity and innovation of Anglo-Saxon bookmakers and stands as an important, if little known, witness to the relationship between early book-making technology and the history of literacy. Benjamin C. Withers examines codicological features of the manuscript, focusing on the working processes of the artist and scribes and seeking to understand how they integrated newly translated text with newly developed imagery so deftly. Grounded in art history and literary theory, this work considers the narrative relationships created by the careful design and seeks to place the Hexateuch within the broader social and cultural development of vernacular literacy in the eleventh century.

Not much can be said with certainty about the life of Claudius Aelianus, known to us as Aelian. He was born sometime between A.D. 165 and 170 in the hill town of Praeneste, what is now Palestrina, about twenty-five miles from Rome, Italy. He grew up speaking that town’s version of Latin, a dialect that other speakers of the language seem to have found curious, but—somewhat unusually for his generation, though not for Romans of earlier times—he preferred to communicate in Greek. Trained by a sophist named Pausanias of Caesarea, Aelian was known in his time for a work called Indictment of the Effeminate, an attack on the recently deceased emperor Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, who was nasty even by the standards of Imperial Rome. He was also fond of making almanac-like collections, only fragments of which survive, devoted to odd topics such as manifestations of the divine and the workings of the supernatural. His De Natura Animalium (On the Nature of Animals) has a similar patchwork quality, but it was esteemed enough in his time to survive more or less whole, and it is about all that we know of Aelian’s work today. A mostly randomly ordered collection of stories that he found interesting enough to relate about animals—whether or not he believed them—Aelian’s book constitutes an early encyclopedia of animal behavior, affording unparalleled insight into what ancient Romans knew about and thought about animals—and, of particular interest to modern scholars, about animal minds. If the science is sometimes sketchy, the facts often fanciful, and the history sometimes suspect, it is clear enough that Aelian had a fine time assembling the material, which can be said, in the most general terms, to support the notion of a kind of intelligence in nature and that extends human qualities, for good and bad, to animals. His stories, which extend across the known world of Aelian’s time, tend to be brief and to the point, and many return to a trenchant question: If animals can respect their elders and live honorably within their own tribes, why must humans be so appallingly awful? Aelian is as brisk, as entertaining, and as scholarly a writer as Pliny, the much better known Roman natural historian. That he is not better known is simply an accident: he has not been widely translated into English, or indeed any European language. This selection from his work will introduce readers to a lively mind and a witty writer who has much to tell us.

This translation originally copyrighted in 2010.