Contains chapters that include Street Life, Earning a Living: Baker, Banker and Garum Maker (who ran the city), and The Pleasure of the Body: Food, Wine, Sex and Baths. This book offers an insight into the workings of a Roman town.

'Much of what you think you know about Pompeii may turn out, on reading this eye-opening book, to be wrong. The town was not full of brothels (Beard counts only one), its water engineering, pace the novelist Robert Harris, was pretty substandard (there may have been aqueducts, but there were no sewers) and the site didn't lie undisturbed until the eighteenth century (many townspeople, for instance, came back soon afterwards to dig up their valuables). Beard, a professor of classics at Cambridge, always wears her learning lightly, and in this outstanding book she has excelled herself, puncturing preconceptions and exposing a whole layer of myth about the world's best-preserved ancient town. The result is an often gripping piece of detective work that also offers a tantalising window into the reality of daily Roman life.' The Sunday Times History books of the year, Andrew Holgate