On Saturday over 25,000 people visited Hadrian's Wall, packing every rolling hillside, car park and vantage spot to see in a huge illumination ceremony organised by Hadrian’s Wall Heritage.

Dr Simon Corcoran and Dr Benet Salway of the history department at University College London have found fragments of an important Roman law code that previously had been thought lost forever.

Two British film-makers have discovered what they believe to be the source of the 1,900-year old aqueduct built by the emperor Trajan in the early second century AD.

Some 350 years after one Nicholas Van Acker changed banking history by wielding his quill and writing on an oblong-shaped piece of paper an order to pay a Mr Delboe £400, the death knell was today sounded on the great monetary institution that is the cheque.

Remember the email from the late Lieutenant Colonel Rupert Thorneloe complaining about a lack of helicopters in Afghanistan? Well, I'm going to tell you a secret. The existence of the email was first disclosed in the Daily Mail.

Popular history cleaves to the one-man principle – that world events are controlled by the caprice of a single character – and it's an approach the history-book-buying public tends to favour. So biographies of Napoleon or Henry VIII triumph over interpretations of events that privilege context instead of individuals. Christopher Kelly's approach appears at first to be the former, in that he credits Attila the Hun with single-handedly ending the once-mighty Roman Empire. But given the lack of contemporaneous information about Attila, and that what there is was provided by Roman scholars who weren't best placed to judge him, Kelly must broaden his net and examine the context of his anti-hero.

Though his title was the catch-phrase of George Formby, Barfe's account of British light entertainment makes only fleeting reference to the horse-faced ukelele-basher.

This was the year that a belief in the Holy Trinity was made obligatory for all subjects of the eastern Roman empire. Freeman's exploration of the "swansong of free speech" makes distant events intensely relevant.

A lifeline to those who consigned treehouses to the same Elysian fields as sand pits and paddling pools, Treehouses, by Paula Henderson and Adam Mornement (Frances Lincoln, £19.99) provides a fascinating account of "the earliest form of natural architecture".

Britain was a part of the Roman Empire for nearly 400 years. The withdrawal, when it came, was cataclysmic; Roman civilisation vanished virtually overnight. In Simon Young's memorable phrase, "History descended on the island like a blade."

It still bears its thrilling ancient name, and the antique ruins on the Palatine Hill, the heart of ancient Rome and home of the Caesars, still gaze down upon it. But now it takes a feat of the imagination to see Circus Maximus as it must have been in its pomp.