He did the Greek bits, I did the Roman, and we learnt a lot from each other along the way! 🏛️

Yes, that was a career highlight! 😁

Update: CUP have also signed! 😁

Lots of work yet to do, but it's great to have reached this stage! 😊

So when friends politely say it's great that I've published a book and they'd love to buy a copy, I won't have to say "Ah, sorry, it's only available in hardback for north of £100". 😬 It will actually be available in a moderately affordable format for anyone who's interested.

And one thing I'm really pleased about is that Cambridge University Press have now moved to a print on demand model, under which all of their books are available in both hardback and paperback formats from the date of publication!

My deadline for delivery is 31 December 2026. I don't intend to be hitting send on New Year's Eve, but that feels manageable. The bulk of the manuscript is already written, so what remains is mainly editing for length and consistency, sorting out the illustrations, writing the conclusion etc.

It also reveals a great deal about how Augustus was seen, understood and used worldwide at this time, including being able to show up differences of detail in how different nations responded to the same figure, and how this reflected their contemporary diplomatic relationship with Italy.

My core arguments are that we can't fully understand what the Italians were doing with Augustus in the late 1930s without looking at this wider global context. For them, it was basically a massive soft power operation pitched at generally very receptive audiences.

But the fact that over 200 commemorative lectures, dinners, performances, exhibitions and statue dedications were also held in other countries across the globe at the same time is largely unknown, and that's what the book is about!

It's well-known that Italy held lavish celebrations for the bimillennium of Augustus' birth in 1938, using them to stoke up nationalist fervour, assimilate Mussolini with Augustus and justify their own imperialism on the world stage.

Aw, thank you! 😊