BOOK REVIEW / Paperbacks: Caesar by Alan Massie, Sceptre pounds 5.99

Again treading in the footsteps of Robert Graves, Massie has produced a third fictional biography of a Roman emperor, this one a third-person 'memoir' by Decimus Albinus, a former close pal of the dictator, who tells how he came to be on the firm of Caesar's assassins. Albinus presents a pre-Freudian Caesar, a psychopath whose charm proves fatal even to himself. The text is larded with the amorality of the Roman ruling class; also with several paraphrases of Shakespeare's canter over the same turf.