The Colosseum - Tapa dura

A superb new cultural history ... pithy and occasionally hilarious. (Evening Standard)

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. (Geographical)

A work of scholarship written with the general reader in mind ... a pleasure to read. (The Spectator)

What the authors have given us in the proverbial multum in parvo. (Sunday Telegraph)

Revels in the accretions of detail and myth ... First-class scholarship and an engagingly demotic style. (Independent)

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. (Lindsey Davis, author of the Falco series)

A wonderful book, worthy of its subject: horrifying, impressive, blood-soaked, occasionally very funny and always entertaining. (Robert Harris)

Imperial Rome was a warrior state. The Colosseum (opened in A.D. 80) was 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). Two leading classical historians 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. The Wonders of the World is a series of books that focuses on some of the world's most famous sites or monuments. Their names will be familiar to almost everyone: they have achieved iconic stature and are loaded with a fair amount of mythological baggage. These monuments have been the subject of many books over the centuries, but our aim, through the skill and stature of the writers, is to get something much more enlightening, stimulating, even controversial, than straightforward histories or guides.