A quiet night in with a book

My friend and colleague Mary Beard gave a firm 'this one not for me' response to the arrival on her desk of Matthew Dennison's biography of Livia, wife of Augustus. What was the point of it?

"Why do people imagine they can write biographies of individual Roman empresses, for whom there is almost no reliable evidence whatsoever? And when the blurb claims that it rests on "extensive new research", what do they mean by that ? What NEW research is there to do on Livia, the wife of the first...