UNDER PUBLICATION

This is a book about books that played a significant part in the 2,000+-year-old civilisation that Europeans have in common. It considers seven books that, over long periods of time, had large numbers of readers – in some cases from Dublin to Budapest and Stockholm to Naples – but which are now rarely read outside the scholarly communities that guard their memory. The books range in time from Cicero’s On Duties in the first century BC to Walter Scott’s Waverley in the early nineteenth century.
For each book, its background an