Basket.

Dropped by Kino this Monday and got myself three nice new books. Ninety dollars is quite an amount to spend, but I splurge on nothing else, so it has to be fine.

Adrian Goldsworthy is fast becoming one of my favourite authors. I picked up his excellent work The Punic Wars in a public library a couple of months back and found it to be one of the best analytical histories I've ever read. He manages to tread the fine line between keeping the work soberly analytical (as opposed to the wild drama of Erik Durschmied, for instance) and actually readable instead of being tediously boring. I genuinely admire his methodical, meticulous writing style that leaves few details out and yet somehow does not put the reader to sleep. A superb book for any layman. The book of his that I bought, In the Name of Rome: The Men Who Won the Roman Empire, I have just begun upon, and it looks very promising indeed.

Another author whom I only discovered this year is Tom Holland - I read his Rubicon earlier this year and found it one of the best narrative histories I have ever gone through. With fine narrative flourish, considerable powers of description and a touch of dry wit, he put across the story of the Roman Republic's final decades brilliantly. Caesar, Pompey and Crassus were depicted not as the inaccessible demigods many history texts show them as, but as human beings, each with their own hopes, dreams, desires and emotions; to be achieved, fulfilled, crushed or toyed with in turn. The human side of history. Persian Fire, the latest work of his I finished in less than a week, is in much the same vein. The story of the Greco-Persian wars, as the back cover states, is indeed "as heart-stopping as any episode in history" - and Holland brings the reader through it all with similar authorial talent to that he displayed in Rubicon, managing this time to bring home to us the sheer epic quality of a struggle that was no less than the original clash of civilizations; the battle between East and West. It is narrative history at its very best.

Then there is Adam Zamoyski, whose work 1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow is one I am familiar with. I read it last year, and it's so good I'm going to read it again. The best history is sometimes the simplest-written, and that is true for this brilliant text - the tale of how one of history's greatest conquerors was brought into decline and eventual fall.

Ought to keep me occupied for some time. I think I may read too fast for my own good.