BBC Radio 4's BookClub with Tom Holland and James Naughtie

To register your interest to book on for this event, please email bookclub@bbc.co.uk.

BBC Radio 4’s Bookclub, presented by James Naughtie, is coming to our bookshop on Wednesday 18th June for a special, intimate event with the award-winning historian and broadcaster Tom Holland.  

The book under discussion for this month’s recording will be Rubicon, first published in 2003, which unravels the bloodstained drama of the final decades of the Roman republic.

The programme is based on audience questions so if you are attending please think of one to ask Tom on the night.

It is recommended that the audience read Rubicon prior to the evening. We have plenty of copies available from the bookshop in advance.

The event will start at 6:15pm and is free to attend. To register your interest to book on for this event, please email bookclub@bbc.co.uk.

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Tom Holland is an award-winning historian, biographer and broadcaster - and presents the world's most popular history podcast, The Rest Is History.

Tom is the author of Rubicon, Persian Fire, Millennium, In the Shadow of the Sword, Dynasty, and Dominion. His most recent book, Pax, covers the heyday of the Roman Empire, from the death of Nero to Hadrian. His translation of The Histories by Herodotus was published by Penguin Classics in 2013, and his translation of Suetonius' The Lives of the Caesars in 2025.

On Rubicon

The Roman Republic was the most remarkable state in history. What began as a small community of peasants camped among marshes and hills ended up ruling the known world. 

Rubicon paints a vivid portrait of the Republic at the climax of its greatness - the same greatness which would herald the catastrophe of its fall. This was the century of Julius Caesar, the gambler whose addiction to glory led him to the banks of the Rubicon, and beyond; of Cicero, whose defence of freedom would make him a byword for eloquence; of Spartacus, the slave who dared to challenge a superpower; of Cleopatra, the queen who did the same. 

Tom Holland brings to life this strange and unsettling civilization, with its extremes of ambition and self-sacrifice, bloodshed and desire. Yet alien as it was, the Republic still holds up a mirror to us. Its citizens were obsessed by celebrity chefs, all-night dancing and exotic pets; they fought elections in law courts and were addicted to spin; they toppled foreign tyrants in the name of self-defence. 

Two thousand years may have passed, but we remain the Romans' heirs.

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'This is narrative history at its best... it really held me, in fact, obsessed me' Ian McEwan, Books of the Year, Guardian