Ancient Roman Historian⁄Author Interview - Emma Southon

Booktube! Today we are welcoming a very special guest. You've probably heard me talk about her a million times across my various channels, and now I have the distinct honor of talking with her today, which I'm over the moon about. She is Emma Southern, Roman historian and author of brilliant books like Agrippina, A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and A Rome of One's Own. Emma, I'm so happy to talk with you today. How are you? I'm very well, thank you. I'm very happy to be here. Thank you so much for inviting me. I still can't really get over the fact that people actually read the books that I write, mostly in my little house, and the fact that people are excited to talk to me is amazing, so thank you. Absolutely, absolutely. No, I think people are going to love this. I think you're just a fascinating persona in the Roman history space, and I kind of want to get into that because today we are going to talk about a range of topics from your current and future books to various Roman figures, your writing style, your reading tastes, but I think first it's best to ask, what was it about ancient Rome that made you say, oh, I can have fun with this, this is what I want to do? I kept trying to leave, to be honest, but I became just really addicted to it. So I started doing Roman history when I was 16, and I did my A-levels, which in the UK is an optional higher education thing, and I only did it because you got to go on a trip to Italy and Greece, and I thought I was going to be a psychiatrist. And I started learning about the Romans, and I think the combination of how they imagine themselves to be, and how I had always understood them to be from school as very serious, very civilized, very pompous people, and how they actually are, which is just chaos men doing bizarre things constantly. And as soon as I read Suetonius, I was like, oh my God, these people are wild. And then I watched the 1979 porn film Caligula, because it just happened to be on TV in the same year. I was like, the combination of how they imagine themselves, and how people imagine them, and what they actually are, it's such a clash. It never stops being funny to me that they can be walking around in a toga, but also they've got a pet leopard. And for their fun times, they will go and watch get murdered in a spectacular execution that is a reenactment of some very highbrow Greek myth. And you're like, who are these people? They want to act like they're fancy, and they're so messy. I don't think people understand that. When I try to sell people, I'm like, why do you love Roman history? Because that's my main area of interest too. Whenever I go to a bookstore, I'm always disappointed in their Roman history book selection, because I have three full hanging shelves of Roman history. I freaking love it, but I don't think people understand the exact reason why. And I think it's exactly what you're talking about. They're incredibly messy. They're incredibly dramatic. And thanks to so many of the Cicero's letters and stuff like that surviving to the modern day, we get a peek into their personal lives, their fears, their motivations, and whatnot. And there's such a contradiction, I think, of what they think they are, and I think what people think they are. Yeah? Yeah. Even Cicero, he is held up for all of Roman history as this ideal man and people try to model themselves off of him constantly. And 200, 300 years later, you have people like Pliny the Younger writing letters about how much they love and admire him and how perfect he was in every way. But then you look at one, his letters and two, his actual life. And he's just so dramatic. He is so pompous. He's a gossip monger. He just loves writing gossip to people. He annoys everyone around him to the extent that they have him exiled just to make him be quiet because he's calling himself the father of the nation. And everyone's like, please stop. He's got those shirts with the really cheaply made shirts. It's Times New Roman font, and it's like, savior of Rome, and then it's like his picture with a press on. And you read his letters, and sometimes he will say things like, as the savior of Rome, I do feel. And you just know that there are people around him who are like, I hate you. But his reputation becomes the reputation that he would have loved as the savior of Rome, as the father of Rome, as this kind of father of letters. But really, he's closer to a little bitchy Truman Capote than he is to anything else, and it's delightful. And he leaves his wife for a younger woman because she's rich. He's such a flawed human being. But we have this memory of him as a perfect kind of marble saint. And that contradiction is with every single Roman and the whole of Roman culture. And therefore, it has never, ever got boring to me. And I have never, even now, like 25 years into this, I'm still reading the sources and finding more stuff every day where I'm like, good grief. Yeah. I'm going totally off script with the questions that I want to ask because I did ask about Cicero later, but I think this thread is so interesting to me. And I want to use it in the framework of his relationship with Clodia Metelli, who I think is a fascinating figure. It's one of my favorite female figures in all of Roman history. You did a profile on her in A Rome of One's Own. She's this aristocratic person who wields a power broker, I think. She wields this influence. And at first, her relationship with Cicero is one of like, they're doing business together, right? She's conveying messages for him and they have a really good relationship. And then once her brother, who is just beyond chaotic, once her brother kind of turns on Cicero, he completely about faces. And he goes on this big propaganda smear campaign against Clodia. And that's the image that comes down of Clodia is all the nasty stuff that Cicero said in retaliation of how her brother treated him. And it's like, you poked at him, you poked at him, you poked at him. And as soon as he turned around and pushed you, you cried foul, and then you want to smear their entire family. Do I have that relationship right? Yeah. In fairness, I believe Clodius did have Cicero exalted and burned down his house, and it was that burning of the house moment that was the turning point there. It was a hurting point. The burning down the house was the real line. But yeah, and then he switches. He's like, okay, you're my enemies now. And he does have, he has the power and he has the ability because he is a great writer and he's a great speaker, allegedly. And so he has the power to ruin someone's reputation, or at least make it so that the thing that people will talk about in, because so much of how people talk about, how people know things in Republican aristocratic circles is they just talk to each other. And it's rumour and it's gossip and it's letters. And so he can make it so that the thing that everybody says is, oh my god, did you hear Cicero said that Clodia slept with her brother, like he slept with both of them now. And he can make it so that people will think of what he has said about them before they think about anything else. Even if it's to refute that he has that kind of cultural cache that he can do it. And he does. And now we remember Cicero as the good guy and Clodius and Clodia, like the Medea of the Palatine they call her because she, he destroys her reputation in order to save the life of a guy who did not deserve it. Yeah, but he has that, that power to do it. So he was not worth pissing off. But, but they did foolishly. And they lost. Am I remembering correctly that Cicero's wife was concerned about the relationship that Cicero had with with Clodia thinking that he may have been a bit obsessed with her? He did call her cow eyes all the time, which was so it doesn't sound in English, like much of a compliment. But is like in Greek, it's like a kind of a divine reference, like saying she has divine eyes. And so it is very much it sounds a bit flirty, like, that he obviously thinks she's kind of hot. And he calls her before he falls out with her and starts calling her nastier names. And he of course, he like refers to her as being effectively very beautiful. And she comes up if we only had his letters and didn't have his speeches, then we would think of Clodia as this very kind of powerful, quite sexy power broker who is going between like she's taking messages from Caesar to Atticus to Cicero to Pompey, to like all of these late Republican figures, she is in the middle of all of them. And she has her husband's power, she has her father's power, her brother's power, and it all kind of she can use it all as she wants to. But we also have the Procolio. And as a result, we also know that she had parties and allegedly liked to sleep with young boys. And she's also kind of known if I have this correctly, kind of like a bit of a pioneer when it when it came to like, I want to say like urban slang gangster chic type style. Is that? Is that accurate? kind of bucking against the more traditional values? Yes. And she's called a new woman by a few people, which is like this kind of Is that coded? Yeah, it is to a certain extent, because it's basically women who are too rich. And therefore, men can't tell them what to do. Right. And therefore, non ideal for men. So it's only men that say this, obviously. Right. But they have family money, they have family power, and they didn't enter a marriage where the husband controls their, their work, their father still has it. So they, their husband can't do anything about they just do whatever they like. They must have been seen as extremely dangerous. Hugely dangerous. I think that's how we entered that conversation to kind of flow through it, I think is a great way to then dial back to your writing, because I think that conversation that we just had is very indicative of the writing style that that you have. And when I've put about picture books to people, I've really tried to emphasize how unique they are in the Roman history book genre, in that they're, they're wickedly smart, but they're conversational in tone. They include modern jokes and references. And it's so refreshing to me, because as you point out in A Room of One's Own, you used a quote from Jane Austen, which refers to history, like, how is it so dull when a great deal of it must be invention? And I think there's a couple of examples that sort of highlight how different you approach things. There is this, there's this line in the book, From Cyrus to Alexander by Pierre Brion, that starts with the pool quote. And even if it is not true, you must, you need to believe in ancient history. And I love that quote. It's high-minded and great and everything. Now, compare that to something that you said in the introduction to Agrippina, which blew my freaking mind when I read it. You say a much more useful way to look at the way Tacitus, Dio, and Suetonius constructed their writing is to think about the story that David Cameron wrote about the pig. What led you to kind of writing about history in that tone? In that, I mean, this is basically how I speak and how I just, how I imagine I would be telling it to you if we were together, essentially. Like I want you to be interested in it. And I don't think, I don't particularly like enjoy reading books where I feel like I'm being lectured to from a pulpit or whereby somebody is trying to be very serious or very neutral. History isn't a neutral thing, really. You can't be objective about it. It is a subjective art, really. It's interpretation of other people's interpretations of other people's interpretations. And so I don't particularly, I always find it slightly frustrating when I have to read something where people pretend they're being objective. And basically, this is how I speak. And I could have been like, at the time when it was in the press in like 2015, it was David Cameron put an intimate part of his body in a pig, which just is, it's really funny. But it's David Cameron put a pig, like that was how it was known at the time. That's how it is like the whole ridiculous scandal is remembered. And it was a glorious day on Twitter when Twitter was good when this broke, and everybody in the whole of the UK had an absolute meltdown about it. And, and it was delightful. And now it is part of David Cameron's legacy forever. Like he was Prime Minister for like eight years or something. And he like did Brexit. And he did very like legalized gay marriage in the UK. But the one of the things that's always always going to be in every history book about him is he's going to have to address the fact that a former colleague of his, like promoted this story that he had had sex with a pig while he was a student. And it's not true, like it didn't happen. And it didn't happen in any sense that and even if he did put an intimate part of his body in a pig's head, it like he didn't cook a pig, but that's how it's remembered and forever. It's that's how it's going to be. And in 2000 years time, if all we're left with is a history about David Cameron, it's going to have to be in there and people are going to like ancient historians in the future are going to have to deal with it. So I think it's useful. And I think that it is funny. And that's important to me. And I think it keeps your attention. Like if I could have used a more staid example, but I think it would have been less effective. And it wouldn't have made people laugh on the train. And that's my favorite thing. Yeah. And I think there are so many examples of those types of stories. I guess a way you could put it is there are many pigs in Roman history. Like we said, but you mentioned an interesting point too, in terms of like people can pretend to be objective. I get comments sometimes saying like, you know, is this book biased or this book was biased. And I'm thinking, find me the unicorn that is an unbiased history book. It's simply not possible, especially the closer that we get to modern stuff. And sometimes I also get feedback on books that are like, why are we applying or they seem to think we're applying modern sensibilities to ancient sources. And I think that criticism misses the mark for me because it implies that it's not useful to explore contemporary sensibilities, prejudices, and agendas to examine why something may be written in a certain way. Or for example, why women may be portrayed in a certain light. So is that kind of like what drove you to this style of, I think the term is like revisionist history. Is that a big motivator for you in terms of like, let's really unpack what these ancient sources are saying and why? It is. And also, I believe very strongly that history is humans writing about humans. And we are all inherently biased and subjective. And all history is looking at the past through the lens of the present. Even if you're writing about last year, from this year, you're still suddenly looking at the lens last year through what you know happened next. So there is no looking at it objectively or understanding it as they would have understood it because you weren't there and you're not them. So I think you may as well make that obvious. And you may as well do it in the most kind of clear and big way possible. Because if you can't get rid of it, you may as well make it a feature, not a bug. And so look at the ancient world through the lens of intersectional feminism, or look at it through the lens of racism and how do you understand racism in the past, or look at it through the lens of whatever the issue is today. When I was a PhD student, me and a friend of mine, Phoebe, did this on a really big scale. And we gave a presentation where we pretended that there had been a zombie apocalypse and that we were now in a future world post zombie apocalypse where we were trying to reconstruct the world. We're coming back to history after the zombies. And so we did two things. One was making ancient sites accessible to the mortally challenged. And the other was reanalyzing ancient texts now that we know that zombies exist. So now we know zombies are real. Can we find evidence of zombies in the past? And turns out you totally can. And so somewhere about... I still have the PowerPoint presentation, which was reassessing all of these texts in the light of knowing that zombies are real. And are we actually looking at zombies? And I think that it's a fun thing to do. I would love a short book that's like the case for ancient zombies. I would love that. I've still got it somewhere, but it was... And that's what we're doing. We've come to these stages where we go through stages of development where we suddenly understand the world in new ways. Like post the 1960s, we understand the world in a place that is very patriarchal and where women have been put into very specific boxes. And you can now go back and look at sources and look the ancient world in a way that people in the 1900s couldn't do because they didn't have that lens to use. So now we can do that. And it opens up. It doesn't detract from what they said at the time. It just is another way of looking at it. And then you can put new lenses over stuff and look at them. And I think that it makes the world more expansive rather than narrowing it or limiting it or making it less useful. Let's recklessly apply some modern sensibilities for this next exercise. It's my favorite thing, so yeah. What Roman emperor would you be okay with dating your metaphorical daughter? You may have to start with checking, with crossing out some... I mean, it's easy to cross a load out. Like Augustus? No. Very controlling. He wouldn't allow his daughter to say things that wouldn't be appropriate, so absolutely not. Tiberius? I mean, if he liked her, he might be all right, but he was a bit odd. Early days Tiberius? Maybe. Later days Tiberius? Definitely not. Post the death of Drusus? No. Caligula? Absolutely not. Claudius? Absolutely not. Do you think, quickly, do you think Caligula may have been the victim of bad PR? Oh, I do. I'm actually a massive Caligula apologist. Okay. A lot of my early academic work was about Caligula and how he gets... Because once he's dead, right, you have to... And he's the first one they assassinate. You have to make sure that everybody thinks that assassinating him was the right decision. So you can't be like, well, he was a good guy, but we just had to get rid of him. You have to say, he was the worst guy. You couldn't possibly understand how terrible it was to live under him. It was just awful in every possible way. But I still don't think I would want to marry my daughter because even the contemporary ones are like, he just seems flighty. And I think that he would just be... He'd be there, he'd be gone, he'd be back. You'd never know where you were with him. And also very traumatized. So I don't know. Until he got some intense therapy, no. Big mother issues, big daddy issues. Claudius, no. Kind of creepy, I think. Had a whole debate about who he should marry and forgot that he'd murdered his wife. That's not great. Also, he once abandoned a child because he got mad at his former wife. So that's not ideal. That's right. Nero, no. Kicked a woman to death. That's problematic. Yeah. Otho, maybe, actually. Galba, no. Horrible. Botellus, probably not. But Otho, I'm kind of a weird Otho-pologist. Mostly because he always kind of did as he was told. He gave up his wife Papaya because she didn't want him anymore. She wanted to marry Nero. And then he's the only one who, in the middle of a civil war, killed himself so that more people wouldn't die on his account. And I think that that says something about Otho. Vespasian. I would let Vespasian marry my... There we go. Vespasian. I reckon I would let Vespasian marry my daughter. Who's famous for his money doesn't stink line, Yes. Yes. Which was actually sensible because it doesn't... Yeah. It's very sensible. Make money off of it. But also his last line was, I think I'm becoming a god, which is quite good. Yes. And other than all of the war he did, he has a long-term relationship with his concubine. He treats her very well. He won't put up with Domitian being horrible to her. Yeah. I'd let him. And maybe Marcus Aurelius, actually. I was going to think you might come with Marcus Aurelius. I forget how Diocletian is with women, but I think as an emperor, he's underrated too, but I'm not sure about his personal life. So, yeah. Vespasian and Aurelius make sense to me. Yeah. Aurelius, his letters to Fronto are always really lovely. I really came around to Marcus Aurelius when I read his letters, and less his affirmations. But yeah, I think in his letters, he talks about his children in a way that he clearly really loves them as well, which I think is nice. He did have 14 of them, which is a lot. But still, yeah. I think that they're quite nice ones. They wouldn't... I mean, in an ideal world, I wouldn't trust a Roman near anybody. Right. We're grading them on a curve, obviously. It's on a curve, yeah. But yeah, I think I would let Vespasian marry my daughter. Okay. I'd keep an eye on him. Keep an eye on him, yeah. Next question. Why is there so much penis in ancient Rome? And I'm not talking about it being largely male-dominated. I'm talking about the winged- The little dicks. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The winged ghost phallus, the amulets with phallic charms, the wind chimes shaped like penises for some reason. There's even a room called the Penis that the Vestal Virgin looks after, even though that's P-E-N-U-S. Still, the question remains, Rome is rotten with penis. What's the deal with that? Basically, it's like a good luck charm. So it is a protective charm, which is incredibly patriarchal, the idea that the petite penis is protective, because then every man has a protective charm attached to him and no woman does. But yeah, so it's basically, they're big believers in magic and what we would call superstition, and touching wood, and charms, and things like that. And the penis is a magical thing for turning away the evil eye, for protecting you from bad magic, from bad vibes, from ghosts that might come and hurt you. And Roman culture believes very strongly in all of these things. And it's kind of attached to the idea of a genus, like you have the genus of a household when you have your household gods, and that's like the Pater Familias. And it's all very connected to this very patriarchal idea that masculinity in its purest form will protect you from badness, which then connects in real fun ways to why they're constantly fighting, and why they think that fighting with swords is literally the most powerful thing that you can do. But yeah, it's basically that. But from a kind of post-Reformation, post-Christian view, it looks hilarious because you have penises with wings that have penises, and then the tail is also a penis, and then they're surrounded by other tiny penises. Or in the British Museum, there's this tiny, tiny, tiny little ring for a child, like an infant. It's minuscule. It's maybe like half a centimetre across. And it's just this tiny little gold ring with a tiny, tiny little penis on it. And the idea of a baby wearing a ring with a penis on it is just so funny. It's like Catherine the Great's furniture in there. Just penises everywhere. Some museums will put it more than others. The British Museum hides all of their stuff. They've got loads of erotic art that they've all got hidden. But in Naples, they have it out way more. And so you can see all of these tables that are held up by men with giant penises and tintinnabula all over the show. It's great. You say it's hidden. Can you flash a Roman historian card and go, I want to go look at that? I could probably ask. I never have. But I could probably ask and say, can I come and have a look at all of your stuff? Oh, that might open up a whole new world for you. It might. One day I want to write something about all of the... The reason that they've got so much of it is there were two guys in the 18th century and 19th century that just collected all of it. Totally normal. Yeah, exactly. And then when they died, their families didn't know what to do with it. So they gave it to the British Museum and were like, we just have tons of stuff with dicks on it. Do you want it? One day I really want to write something about those guys. What was the attraction? What was the thing in there? Everybody, they were just really just hooking through everything they could, trying to find all the stuff with penises on it and collecting them up. Super about it. Super about it. You mentioned things that you want to write. And so you've the three books that I've read from you. One is a biography on Agrippina the Younger called Agrippina. One is an examination of murder in Rome called A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And then the other is A Rome of One's Own. We mentioned that. That's right there. That's the history of Rome told through the profiles of 21 women. But you've recently announced that you have a new two-book deal in place, I believe. And I So the next one that I'm doing at the moment is service. So that is going to be a kind of cultural history of slavery in the Roman Empire. And pretty much looking at how embedded slavery was in Roman Empire and in Roman culture and how it could not have functioned without it. Because at every stage from the bedroom to the mines, to the mints, to the street cleaners, to the carrying people in households. There is slavery everywhere. They can't eat without slavery. They can't build without slavery. Half of them can't get dressed without slavery. So it's basically a look at that. So that's what I'm writing at the moment and trying not to make it really depressing, but trying to make it humane and kind of tell the stories of enslaved people as much as just being God's slavery. And then the one after that is currently called Friends, Romans, Countrymen, but I'm open to other titles. I feel like that one could have a better title. But it's going to be a look at the Roman imperial court. And so looking at the palace on the Palatine and how it starts with Augustus and then how it develops through Vespasian and then up to about the Tetrarchy, looking at kind of the intense decadence of it. Who lives there? What are they doing? What does palace look like? How does it change and grow? Who are these people and what are they doing? Does the one guy that stands in the middle of it affect what the palace looks like? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Oh, that's fascinating. I'm looking forward to this. And I think you attached some potential dates to those as well. I think it's 2026 and 2028. Is that correct? That's the current plan. Yes. So yeah, this one needs to be finished by next year. So it's currently going to be out in, I think, May 2026 or spring 2026. So wish me luck. Oh, absolutely. And you said before we started the recording that you're reading Livy up until this point of recording, looking into it. So you've been doing your due diligence on the research there, which is nice. Oh, yeah. Very much so. Yeah. So reading about captives right now. So looking at how there's all these arguments about how Rome replenished their slave population, basically. How do people become enslaved by Rome or Romans? And so one of the main ways, obviously, is that they just took captives, took war captives. So looking into the process of that, what does it actually look like to be captured by a Roman? What happens to you? And who are they? Because the kind of popular fiction of it is that they are all free people who are just living in whatever town the Romans have turned up at and then absolutely destroyed. But obviously, a lot of the people that are taken in slavery in Rome are already enslaved in these various places. They're already property. And they're just taken as booty. And how whether a free person becomes enslaved really depends on the mood of the general at the time, basically. He can let you go, he can ransom you, or he can take you if you really pissed him off. You mentioned there's debate about it. And I personally love a good fight between historians. One example being Timothy Snyder, the World War II historians, Timothy Snyder gave a bad review of one of Richard J. Evans' books. And then Richard J. Evans has gone on some multi-year tirade against Timothy. I just find it fascinating how petty that they can be. Do you come across that at all in the circles that you... I don't know if you run in Roman historian circles or if you observe any of that stuff. What's that like between Roman historians? MS. I don't think you tend to get that so much anymore. We're all quite nice to each other these days. At least I haven't seen one recently. The big debate about how the Roman slave supply was replenished happened in journals and therefore is the most fun kind of historian debate because everybody pretends they're being really polite while they're clearly actively furious at the other person and think that they're an idiot. And you get a lot of, if Harris had read my article properly, clearly my respondent has not read so-and-so. And you're like, okay, I love it. And it's the best kind of argument as well because it's an argument that's impossible to answer. We do not know how many people were enslaved by the Romans. We do not know how many people were even enslaved in Italy. So we don't know what proportion of the population is enslaved. You can't know, one, how many they need to replenish it. We don't know how many were freed. We don't know how many died. You can't answer the question because you don't know any of the premises. So it's the best kind of argument where they're just getting real mad because the other person started with different assumptions. And it's delightful. I think that popular historians all tend to be quite polite to each other. Maybe what they mean about me behind my back, but as far as I'm aware, we're all quite delightful. Speaking of popular historians, is there this sense that other historians that may write more academic works kind of look down on popular history? Because I've seen Honor Cargill-Martin talking about this. She wrote a book on Messalina that was excellent. And she was mentioning how, I saw an interview with her, why popular history is important. What's that relationship like? Is it contentious or is it kind of like, hey, you're getting people into this and maybe they'll branch out into the more hard stuff kind of feeling? I think it's kind of a bit of both. If you are an academic historian, and I'm a lapsed academic, and Honor is still doing her PhD, so she's still an academic. And the academic part of any historian just wants to do detail and granular and argue to the point of where you feel like you can't argue anything else. And the popular side wants to be like, here's a cool story, come and listen to my story and get people involved. And so the academics are always going to be frustrated that there's going to be a certain amount of glibness or lack of detail in a popular history. But I think as with when films come out, there always is an opportunity for academics to be like, this book said this, and they're wrong because. And then it gives them an opportunity to talk about it, which is always, I think, quite useful. Now Gladiator 2 is coming out and so many Roman historians are going to be able to do YouTube videos about all of the things that are wrong with it, like they did with Napoleon, and it'll be great for them. Generally not that contentious, I think that nowadays academic historians understand that there needs to be that popular attraction as well. You need to be getting people into doing the courses and reading their stuff, because otherwise they're just talking to nobody. And popular historians understand that you need the academics, you have the time and ability and the space and the access to the conferences and journals or even academic publishing where they can write an intensely granular book about one part of legal theory, and then I can read that book, and then I cannot actually mention it in the book at all, but I know it and I can not make any hideous mistakes. And so I think that as a general rule, we kind of balance each other. And I know that some spoken to some classes and stuff, so I know some academics use my books, which I always find unbelievably flattering, like knowing that academics don't hate me, or think that I'm making terrible monstrous mistakes. But I think it's a symbiotic relationship these days. It used to be much more contentious, I think when academia was a bit healthier. And now academia, especially arts and humanities are very threatened in the UK, particularly. And so they understand that every so often they need a gladiator or a popular book to push students into them. Yeah, they can sneer at it, but they can still make content out of it. Exactly. And that's good for everybody. That's a fascinating ecosystem to me. And you mentioned how validated it can be that historians will cite your work. I get the same feeling when I'm able to make connections with you and Honor Cargill-Martin and people like Patrick Lyman and whatnot. It's like, okay, I make a lot of history book content. Thank God the historians don't hate me, at least the ones that I talk with anyway. God no. Because most book content, obviously, I'm also a bookseller. So two days a week, I work as a bookseller. And I know what most book content looks like from that. And it is mostly not history books. And so anybody who's talking about history books and saying, this one's a good one, this one's a good one, if you like this, you'll like this, is fantastic for us. Because we know that we're not writing in the world's most popular market. And we know that we're never going to be buying a palace with our massive book earnings. We pretty much do it for the love of it and the hope that we'll sell a few thousand copies. And so anybody else who is also saying, I love this and telling other people who might be interested is great. That's awesome. Awesome. Yeah. And it's funny too. I sometimes get the comment that like, I don't believe you read all those. I think you just skimmed them and used AI. And my thinking is, then why would I pick the history genre if I'm just trying to make money out of this? Because it's not a top-selling one. Romanticism is right there. It's right there. Yeah. Speaking of which, and I don't want to be respectful of your time as well, but the last thing that I wanted to talk about, which you alluded to it, was you work at a bookstore. You mentioned on your sub stack, some of your reading habits and whatnot, and you're a pretty voracious reader. And it's not always the history stuff. You also read some different genres. We talked before we started recording about the Sharpe series from Bernard Cornwell, which I just read Sharpe's Tiger. I really enjoyed it. You mentioned in A Realm of One's Own, your silly little Sharpe novels. And I was like, that sounds fun. I kind of need that in my life. Did I get you into Sharpe? Oh my God. You did. It was directly you. Yes, your influence got me into Sharpe. That's delighted me. Genuinely, everything I know about Napoleonic Wars comes from Sharpe. And I just in my head have to take out Richard Sharpe from all of the stories. I'm like, okay, I guess I know what happened at Salamanca. Yeah. You read the note at the end about the... Yeah. Because I don't know, that's actually a weak spot for me too. So when I read it, I was like, oh, I'm actually kind of getting a history lesson too. This is cool. So I really enjoyed it. They're so fun. Yeah. What other book genres do you tend to lean towards? Or if you have favorite books that you would recommend to everybody or anything like that, what's your current taste? I'm a big science fiction reader. So that was my main... Science fiction, horror are probably my main genres really that I read a huge amount of. This evening, actually, I'm going to my sci-fi book club that I've been running for eight years. It's an eight anniversary of my science fiction book club. I just think sci-fi is such a vast genre that you can read in and you can do so much with it. And you can do science fantasy as well and do big things. And so I love all of the James S. A. Corey books. And I also love the way that you can look at the world and how people imagine the world. I think it tells you so much about a culture and a time. So it's like so much Chinese science fiction coming out right now, which is fantastic. And Afrofuturism. And you can... Yeah. So I read a huge amount of science fiction and I read a huge amount of horror as well. Like Stephen Graham Jones, I'm completely obsessed with currently. I've been trying to read as much of his as I can, but he's written like 20 novels. So it's quite tough. And yeah, so those are my main like really big genres. And occasionally I lean into fantasy, but I don't like dragons. I'm the only science fiction person in the world that doesn't like Star Wars and I don't like dragons. So I'm tough work with fantasy. But I will say everybody in the whole world should read Susanna Clarke's novels, Piranesi and Jonathan Strange. Perfect novels. And of all of my tattoos, I only have one book tattoo and it's a Piranesi tattoo because I just think she's perfect in every way. And then I read a lot in translation as well. I really like reading in translation. So I'm on a big kick for South American literature at the moment. So I've been reading loads of Chilean books and that's been quite fun. And I will always read like the International Booker shortlist because I always think that's really fascinating. I don't read contemporary realism that much. You have to really push me to read like contemporary stuff, but unless it's in translation, in which case I'm fine. But I read a lot and the room I'm currently in is my library. I don't know if you can see, this is like one corner of my library here, which is organized alphabetically. And so there's a lot of science fiction and a lot of stuff in translation. This is a book everybody should read, thinking about it. As it's here, Benjamin Labattut, When We Cease to Understand the World. It is Argentinian, I think, but it's fictionalized nonfiction about basically the development of nuclear physics and Schrodinger and Heisenberg. And it is brilliant. Excellent recommendations. You mentioned Piranesi. I just did a video recommending that. I think that one is so good if you're able to... I woke up one morning. I woke up early. I don't know why. It was like 4.30 and I thought, I think it's time to take down Piranesi and I think I can take it down before I need to go to work at nine. And I was able to, and I just read it in one stretch. I turned my brain off because my brain wasn't functioning anyway because it was that early in the morning. And I just said, I'm going to allow this book to be confusing and to call me stupid and I'm not going to try to figure it out too much. And I think that really allowed me to just live in the story and really enjoy it. And then afterwards, researching Clark, Susannah Clark, the author, where she was in her life and some of the issues that she was having and it being written during the COVID lockdown and everything like that, brought even more context to the book itself. And I think it's brilliantly done. So I think that's an amazing rec. Yeah. She has a real ability to make very, very strange worlds feel very, very real. And it riffs on my favorite of the Narnia books, which is The Magician's Nephew, which I think is best one by Miles, which has that same kind of world between worlds. And I just think that, I think she is a genius. And that and Jonathan Strange are ones that I reread every couple of years and just enjoy all over again. Amazing. Amazing. Okay. I think I would love to do this with you again because I had so much fun and there's so much stuff to unpack. I want to thank you for joining me here today. Is there anything you want to end with or hit the listeners or viewers with or anything like that? I mean, if you want to buy my books, you can find them in bookshops. You can find me at Emma Southern on Instagram. That's the only thing I'm on anymore, but you can find me there and see pictures of my cat and buy books in translation because you get to see the world in a whole different way. And that's fun.