Colleen McCullough, 1937-2015

Nobody wrote historical fiction quite like Colleen McCullough. Her Masters of Rome books were giant, comprehensive, exhaustively researched – and utterly compelling. In seven books, she told the entire story of the fall of the Roman Republic, from the outbreak of the Jugurthine War in 110 B.C. to the death of Caesarion in 30 B.C.

Rarely in human history, she said in one of her forewords, had so many giant figures lived so closely clustered in time and space. She brought them to life in all the...