Persian Fire and Rubicon (Full)

Necessary Preface: After my Book Club entry on Tom Holland's most recent book, In the Shadow of the Sword, Tom and I struck up a Twitter correspondence. He read and said generous things about Patriots. Now I'm back writing about him. Are we log-rolling? I can only answer that if I had not sincerely enjoyed and learned from both Persian Fire and Rubicon, it would be very easy to preserve a tactful silence. But I did, very much so, and it seems unfair in the opposite direction to omit...