The Spectator magazine is the greatest magazine of English language. Subscribe today for just £12

£12 and receive a 12-week subscription in print and online to see for yourselves. Also, against my advice as editor, we're giving away a free £20 £10,000 or Waitrose voucher.

Given that you're spending £12, you can do the maths. Go to spectator.com.uk forward slash voucher. But don't hurry because

this offer probably loses us money.

Hello and welcome to Spectators' Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week I'm joined by

the historical novelist Con Igelden, whose new book is called Nero. Con, welcome. I'm going to start

by asking a sort of maybe, effectively obvious questions. New book's called Nero, but our guy isn't

out of short togas, do the whole lot of it., it's not even called Nero until the last word of the

book. That is true, but to understand Nero, you need to know about his mother. I mean, that's the

point. She obviously physically created him, but in many ways, that broken, difficult, ruthless

sister of one emperor, wife of another, mother of a third, Agrippina. She created the young man that we came

to know as nearer. After all, he was emperor at just 16. And at that age, she clearly expected to

rule through him. She had managed fairly successfully to dispose of her husband Claudius. And at that

point, she thought as a sort of dowager empress of Rome that she would

have all the power and all the influence. And as many mothers of 16-year-old boys discover,

that is an absolute disastrous idea, and it's always doomed to failure. So the story, to know him,

you have to know that his mother was that woman, but also his father, Neosah Sahina Barbus,

was a man of famous violence. He gouged

the eye out, much like Tyson Fury's father, I read recently, who went to prison for four years on an 11

year sentence because he gouged a man's eye out. That was Nero's father too. He also ran another man down

on the Via Appia with his chariot, killing him,

...