The narrative centres on the powerful nostalgia of a house in time, within a landscape that records the passage of generations. When Anna ponders Fairhurst’s picture, she wonders “for a mad moment” what it would be like if the picture were a two-way window.
The novel, beginning at the Peterloo Massacre, recapitulating the Napoleonic Wars and touching upon the Spanish Civil War, is ambitious in concept and design. Anna is a neglected and alienated teenager dumped at a boarding school in Suffolk in the hot summer of 1976. Here she meets two professional photographers, Theo and Eva, who introduce her to an emotional and intellectual world she has lacked.

They kindle in her a burning sense of the proximity of the past. Darwin’s second narrator is Stephen Fairhurst, a wounded veteran of Waterloo, whose secret history is gradually revealed. Historical romance, Gothic tale and Bildungsroman, Darwin’s novel ponders its own processes, mesmerised by the “strips of time” that layer one another in a place. Emma Darwin’s debut is an historical novel with a dual time frame. Coming out of the white at me was a woman’s face,” recalls Anna, haunted by the gradual manifestation on a photographic tray. The reader is spellbound too as “each strip of time” is revealed, “all the way to the far end, where the man’s face was like a patch of cloud against night”. Was Caesar an adventurer with luck, a typical Roman aristocrat only concerned with his glory – or a visionary with a new plan for the governance of Rome? It may well be that Julius Caesar was the thinking man’s opportunist – a dynast who pursued his own selfish interests, but had ready a blueprint for radical change just in case it were to come in handy.Anthony Everitt’s life of Augustus will be published by John Murray in October.

He always remembers the common soldier and evokes with great skill the terrifying experience of hand-to-hand fighting.One central mystery is unsolved and must remain so. I have only a few quibbles: for example, Caesarion was not the name that Cleopatra gave to her son by Caesar, but a nickname conferred by the Alexandrian populace.So it is a pity that Caesar: the Life of a Colossus sometimes reads more like a textbook than the biography of a flesh-and-blood being Paragraphs are of Proustian length. Future events are frequently discussed in advance, dampening narrative suspense.But Goldsworthy is a fine military historian and his account of the Gallic Wars is exemplary. He is a sober, comprehensive and fair-minded writer, who gives every topic its due attention The scholarship is up-to-date; the judgements sound. They could not forgive his pre-eminence and formed a conspiracy to assassinate him, a task accomplished on 15 March 44BC.Adrian Goldsworthy is the latest in a long line of scholars to write the life of this remarkable man, who brought down the Republic and prepared the way for the first of the emperors, his adopted son Augustus. They planned to prosecute him for breaking the law and so terminate his career. Faced with their recalcitrance, Caesar precipitated a civil war, which he won after a series of quick-fire campaigns.Now undisputed ruler of Rome, he knew he could not govern alone, and did his best to conciliate his fellow noblemen.