The Little Book of Ancient Rome: A Pocket Guide to an Epic Civilization, Including Key Events, People, Trivia and More

by Tom Sykes, Summersdale Publishers

144 pages, Paperback

Published February 3, 2026

About the author

Tom Sykes was born in Portsmouth in 1979, and educated at the University of East Anglia and Goldsmiths College. He has travelled extensively in Europe, Africa and Asia and worked as a journalist and teacher in India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana.
Tom’s writing has appeared in The Daily Telegraph, The Scotsman, New Internationalist, New African, Red Pepper, The London Magazine, Travel Africa, The Journalist, Globetrotter, The Spark Magazine, Wings of Oman, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, The Philippines Free Press and Quill, Going Places, GoNomad, The Expat, The Bristol Review of Books as well as in international anthologies such as Small Voices, Big Confessions (2006) and Urban Odysseys: KL Stories (2009). His novel Bad Territory was serialized in Ruthless Peoples magazine beginning in August 2009. Tom has been a staff writer for the US educational publisher World Trade Press.
Since 2005, he has co-edited and contributed to 3 anthologies of hitchhiking stories that have sold 20,000 copies worldwide. The first, No Such Thing as a Free Ride? was serialized in The Times and named The Observer’s Travel Book of the Month.
Since early 2015 Tom has been the co-editor of Star & Crescent, a Portsmouth-based community journalism and hyperlocal news website which recently received a prestigious NESTA grant.
Tom is a Lecturer in Creative and Media Writing at the University of Portsmouth and is pursuing PhD studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. He has also lectured at the Universities of Liverpool, Philippines and Malaysia and was a Visiting Lecturer at the Eagle Vision Institute, Ghana in 2013. He is a regular performer at spoken word events and his recordings have appeared on Audiobookradio.net and Wildfire Radio.
A member of the British Guild of Travel Writers and the National Union of Journalists, Tom won the Daily Telegraph’s ‘Just Back’ travel writing prize in 2011. His ‘Ringroad to Immolation’ was named one of the best online short stories of 2004 by StorySouth.com.
He is currently writing The Bradt Travel Guide to Ivory Coast, a chapter for The Cambridge History of Literature and the Environment and Blood is Thicker in Manila, a memoir of his time surviving a Third World megacity with his then partner and four year old stepdaughter.

Reviews

[Cynthia Langley · Rating 2 out of 5]

Ancient Rome, you elude me. But I will come back for you someday.

History has always been my worst subject. My brain sees a timeline and immediately clocks out. 😂 So when I picked up a book called The Little Book of Ancient Rome, I was hoping for something that would give me a nice little crash course without making me feel like I needed a degree in Roman history first.

And…well.

Sykes kinda threw me into the deep end and assumed I knew how to swim.

What I really loved about this book was how SHORT the chapters were and how each one focused on a different topic. It made it really easy to pick up and put down, and I appreciated how much information was packed into such a small book.

The problem was that I constantly felt like I was missing the backstory. I had to look up SO many things while reading because the book would mention something as if I was already supposed to know what it meant or why it mattered. It wasn’t really streamlined, and the information sometimes felt clunky when put together.

And I get that this is supposed to be a condensed little book, but unfortunately, it kind of had the opposite effect for me. I finished knowing more about Ancient Rome…but I also had approximately 47 new tabs open trying to figure out what the hell I had just read. 😂

I think I would’ve enjoyed this MUCH more if it had been chronological, with the extra topics woven into the timeline. Or even something like a “day in the life” of different tiers of Roman society.

I already knew a little about the architecture and mythology, although admittedly I’m much more familiar with the Greek counterparts. And I genuinely wanted to learn more about Rome because it’s a civilization that has fascinated people for centuries.

This book definitely taught me things. I just don’t think it taught them in a way that worked for someone coming in with basically no historical background.

[Keith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very cute & informative. I want more of these.

[Kirsty · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great light read with very small chapters!! So informative

[Catarina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Um pequeno livro que trouxe do British Museum sobre Roma Antiga. Não desiludiu e serviu o propósito - saber um pouco mais, sem grande profundidade, mas o suficiente para poder emergir um pouco mais na cultura desta civilização. Não fiquei wow, mas foi uma leitura fácil e agradável.