It was really the army's fault. Bored with respectable middle-aged generals, they picked Elagabalus, thirteen-year-old high priest of a Syrian sun-god, to be Emperor of Rome.

Golden-haired, handsome as a god, a brilliant charioteer with a passion for stable boys - this wilful adolescent was hardly a fit successor to Caesar and Augustus. With real government in the able hands of family favourites - grandmother, mother, aunt - he was left free to pursue his own extravagant pleasures until his inevitable assassination.

This fantastic reign with its fabulous banquets and practical jokes, painted boys and rickshaw girls, makes a fine subject for one of Alfred Duggan's most skilful reconstructions of history.

'An intimate first-hand account of the bizarre, off-beat moment in history when the exotic East descended upon the sober West' Evening Standard

'Mr Duggan has a marvellously wry quality in his writing. Behind the straight face of his novel there is a disciplined hilarity which is tremendously appealing' Sunday Times