In 49 BC, 704 years since the founding of Rome, Julius Caesar (then a Roman general and governor of Gaul) crossed a small river in the north of Italy called the Rubicon and knowingly plunged Rome into civil war. Holland tells the story of Caesar and his generation, which was to witness the twilight of the Republic and its bloody transformation into an empire. Historical figures are brought to life, from Cicero and Cleopatra to Spartacus, the slave who dared to stand against the superpower.

Holland pictures Rome as a disciplined and ambitious predator, a state willing to commit acts of shocking barbarism to preserve its freedom. It is also a state ’as unsettlingly familiar as it is strange’ – its citizens enjoyed all-night dances, were intrigued by the cult of celebrity and had a fascination for unusual pets. Holland’s is a story of intrigue, triumph, cruelty and violence, a retelling of a moment in history that still echoes with significance. As Holland describes it, ’so fateful was Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon that it has come to stand for every fateful step taken since’.

Rubicon is a history of this pivotal era and a portrait of a civilisation in its extremes of self-sacrifice and rivalry, decadence and catastrophe, war and ambition.