Rhymed verse is a wide net
Through which many subtleties escape.
Nor would I take it to capture a strong thing
Such as a whale.

This manifesto for free verse comes from a poet whose associates at the time included Harold Monro, Richard Aldington, and D.H. Lawrence in London, Harriet Monroe and Louis Untermeyer in New York, Natalie Clifford Barney in Paris. Anna Wickham (1883–1947) mixed with the modernist writers and artists of her time on both sides of the Atlantic and was widely admired for her early books, The Contemplative Quarry (1915), The Man with a Hammer (1916), and The Little Old House (1921).

Yet subtleties were not her strong point, and she often fell back on rhymed verse to make the challenging feminist statements for which she is best known, ‘strong things’ such as: ‘I married a man of the Croydon class / When I was twenty-two / And I vex him, and he bores me / Till we don’t know what to do!’ and, indeed, for her signature poem, ‘Note on Method’: ‘Here is no sacrificial I, / Here are more I’s than yet were in one human, / Here I reveal our common mystery: / I give you woman. / Let it be so for our old world’s relief / I give you woman, and my method’s brief.’

The eminent French historian Annette Wieviorka, in The Era of the Witness (1998, English version in 2006), analyses the difficulties arising, in writing historical narratives about recent times, from the exponential growth in the number of people wanting their stories to be heard. Wieviorka, whose field of specialisation is the Shoah, traces the trend of what she calls the ‘democratisation’ of history back to the Eichmann trial of 1960, following it through other celebrated war crimes trials such as those of Klaus Barbie, Paul Touvier, and Maurice Papon. Her historiographical point is that, while eyewitness testimony is crucially valuable, it poses inevitable and serious problems in terms of its historical reliability; and when it reaches the volume represented by, say, the Yale University Fortunoff Video Archives or the Spielberg Visual History Archives, the task of any single historian mastering the accumulated data becomes simply impossible.

Anne Sebba, in this book whose title pushes every button a literary publicist could possibly desire, has not, despite her own historical training, taken these issues into account. The result is an untidy, frustrating mixture of historical surfing, thoughtfully recounted and pertinent stories, and journalistic gossip. There can be no doubting the author’s passion, nor the work that she has devoted to her project. She draws on a huge range of sources. There are reputable existing historical accounts, including that of Hanna Diamond, whose Women and the Second World War in France 1939–1948: Choices and constraints (1999) has very much the same perspective and time frame as Sebba’s. There are diaries, letters, memoirs, newspaper reports, internet sites, interviews conducted by the author, and, more rarely, actual archival materials. Such variety is not in itself a problem: what is missing is the critical distance and the careful cross-checking necessary to mould such materials into a consistent, historically convincing overview.

The need for this book is self-evident in a way that a similarly historical anthology for New South Wales or Victorian poetry would not be. From many perspectives, Perth is one of the most remote cities in the world and there is no doubt that the state’s uniqueness is captured in this extensive, though tightly edited, selection. Despite its comparable treatment of Aboriginal people, Western Australia’s nineteenth-century history (with its brief experience of convictism and its relatively late gold rush in the 1890s) is different from that of the eastern colonies, about which Western Australians continue to feel a mild, justified paranoia.

Of course, Western Australia occupies about half the Australian continent, so there is also considerable regionality (likewise reflected in the selections here). John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan’s introduction to all this is suitably comprehensive and informative (if, occasionally, a little dramatic in its claims for the international status of some its poets).

Mary Beard’s new history of Rome, reviewed here in March 2016, ended at the point where Edward Gibbon began his great Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in what he called the happy age of the Antonines. That is also where Michael Kulikowski takes up the story in this book, the first of two intended volumes, although, as he admits, he will not follow Gibbon all the way to the Turkish conquest of Constantinople, the second Rome, in 1453.

Kulikowski demonstrates impressive mastery of a vast and complex field, made more complicated by the chronic tendency of leading Romans to change their names for various political reasons, and the surprising lack of reliable historical texts from this period. Names, outlines of biography, and some events may be recorded in inscriptions, but numismatics is a particularly precious resource: thus coins recording a claim to imperial status are confirmations, and sometimes the only evidence, of attempts at usurpation.

Even the happy second century, as Kulikowski shows, was far from perfectly serene. The Empire had by now reached its greatest extent, but its many borders required permanent vigilance. No state had ever had a more efficient system of command and communication or such a highly organised military to maintain peace and order: and not only in the Antonine period, but for centuries afterwards, Rome did generally guarantee the security of its subject populations.