As always, I've come away with a new understanding of history, and a plethora of fun and unusual facts to fling at my colleagues. I took one of the bags, pulled its seal open, and very, very gently, emptied out its contents onto the plastic tray.

Always fascinating, Professor Alice Roberts is fast becoming a national treasure and this, like all her books, is insightful and well worth reading. Whether officially in or out of the Empire, in or out of the wider European economic union, life in Britain – would go on.

Most of the classical authors who wrote about Roman Britain didn’t even live here, such as the senators Tacitus and Dio Cassius. The book was enjoyably chugging along fairly well, with a couple blips of her personal politics and a barely hidden distain of religion, and then that let down at the very end in the Postscript. On an individual basis, an ancient genome can provide information about the sex of a person, and even provide clues to appearance. It is not included in promotions available to our main range products, as stated in our terms of service.

In Buried she explores a number of burials and the funerary rites these remains give us tantalising glimpses of. I enjoyed the links to modern life, although it seems the author was careful to avoid offering her views on Brexit, despite linking the end of the Roman Empire on these isles and its impacts to what is happening today. This book is full of fascinating phenomena (I especially enjoyed the chapter on decapitated burials), but the archaeological detective work usually leads to theories rather than definite answers, which is as it should be.

Historians argue about this distinction – perhaps because it seems relevant to whether some sort of ‘British’ identity was maintained while ‘British’ kings invited Roman troops into the land of their fathers.