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The Best Fiction Books » Contemporary Fiction

The Last Days of Pompeii by E Bulwer Lytton
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The Last Days of Pompeii

by E Bulwer Lytton

Recommendations from our site

“A 19th-century bestseller about Pompeii.” Read more...

Books about Pompeii

“It didn’t teach us much about the science of volcanoes but it taught us the aphorism that man lives on this planet subject to geological consent which can be withdrawn at any time.” Read more...

The best books on Volcanoes

Simon Winchester, Journalist

“It’s the classic Pompeii disaster story everybody replays when they write about Pompeii. When he went to Pompeii it was a ruin. These days they’ve done a lot of work on it. What Lytton did was build it up layer by layer. And what you get is a fantastic reconstruction of the ancient world. Christians who are going to escape, the nasty priest of Isis, the sacrifices and the gladiators. The cultural backwash that came out of it was extraordinary. The characters, statues, movies.” Read more...

The best books on Ancient History in Modern Life

Mary Beard, Classicist

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