Robert Harris has written a lot of Rome. A trilogy about Cicero, a one-off set in Pompeii, and now, reviewed this week in The Guardian, Agrippa — a novel that had the entire imperial cast to choose from and handed the microphone to the aide. It is a fictional memoir by Octavius's right-hand man, running from civil war through the assassination of Julius Caesar, thick with bloodshed, betrayal, and the scramble for position. Octavius is in the book. He just isn't holding the pen.
The same week, Project Gutenberg's feed listed Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte — Complete . The name on that title page belongs to Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne. Two centuries apart, one instinct: to understand someone who bent history, ask whoever had to be in the room while he bent it.
Read this week's books together and a pattern comes into focus. The accounts we trust about power tend to come from one seat over.