If asked to name and ancient culture that has stood the test of time and fires the imagination when mentioned, it's hard to go past ancient Egypt. The visuals
10 things we learnt on the day international travel resumed telegraph.co.uk - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from telegraph.co.uk Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
8 New Books We Recommend This Week
March 11, 2021
Sometimes a book sells itself: Oh, Kazuo Ishiguro’s new novel is a mournful allegory about artificial intelligence and the challenges of human connection? Sign me up, please! (But even if you’re on the same page, do make time to read Radhika Jones’s lovely review of the book; you’ll be glad you did.) Other times a good review makes all the difference. That was the case this week with Mary Roach’s wonderful take on “This Is the Voice,” by John Colapinto, an in-depth nonfiction book about the larynx. Trust me, you’ll want to read it after you read the review.
The Life of a Soldier
Roman soldiers fighting against the Dacians by Nicolas Beatrizet, 1553.Credit.Heritage Art/Heritage Images, via Getty Images
By Thomas E. Ricks
In his encyclopedic
GLADIUS: The World of the Roman Soldier (University of Chicago, $30), Guy de la Bédoyère collects pretty much every fact known about what it was like to be in the military arm of the Roman Empire which was pretty much the only limb of government power outside Rome.
Rome’s soldiers were surprisingly literate, because the Roman Army emphasized precise record-keeping. They also were a remarkably diverse group. A document from Egypt that listed the birthplaces of 36 members of two legions had them coming from today’s central Turkey, Syria, Cyprus, France, Italy and Egypt itself. Some of the soldiers who died in Britain in the first century A.D. had been born in today’s Bulgaria, Spain, Hungary and Italy, according to their tombstones. The common soldier tended to remain with one legion for