The tragedy is all the more bitter because it follows victory. Catilina is defeated. Harris tells the story brilliantly, and even those who know how it ends will be thrilled by the tension of the conflict. Roman politics has rarely been so skilfully presented, its twists and turns made comprehensible. But Cicero, superbly adroit and sympathetic in danger and in the face of adversity, reveals his chief fault of character, which was vanity, in the hour of triumph. Rewarded with the title "Father of his Country", he becomes boastful and silly: "O fortunatam natam me consule Romam" ("O happy Rome, born in my consulship"). Meanwhile his enemies, among them the scapegrace, Clodius, are plotting his downfall.

We know more about Cicero the man than about any other Roman, so rich are the sources, much of his extensive correspondence and many of his speeches having survived. 

Harris is faithful to the sources, but imaginatively so; he animates the raw material, so that we share his hero's hopes, fears and perplexities. The characterisation of the other main actors in the drama is equally vivid: Pompey, Crassus, Cato, Lucullus, Clodius (and his beautiful sister-lover Clodia), and a host of other senators, tribunes and agitators parade before us as we are guided through the bloodstained labyrinth of late Republic politics. Only Caesar is mysterious-as he was to Cicero.

This is a magnificent novel, better than Robert Graves's Claudius novels, better (I reluctantly admit) than the six books of my own Imperial sequence. The third volume will complete the tragedy. Nothing, I trust, will distract Robert Harris from finishing the work.