Last year's exhibition by the same name at the British Museum drew in the public. The legacy is a splendidly illustrated exhibition catalogue with 400 plates that will be a point of reference for teachers in schools, undergraduates and the public. The book, like the exhibition, focuses on the house set in an urban context (ch. 1) and includes living over a shop (ch. 2), the atrium (ch. 3), cubiculum (ch. 4), garden (ch. 5), with an interlude to consider living rooms and interior design (ch. 6), followed by dining (ch. 7), kitchens, toilets and baths (ch. 8), and, finally, the death of the cities (ch. 9). There are also notes, bibliography and a list of exhibits.

The format raises a point about exhibition catalogues and their rôle in the presentation of research. As the author pointed out publicly in talks and lectures, the exhibition was for the public rather than academics and — to an extent — so is the catalogue. It sits in the tradition of the catalogue produced by Amanda Claridge and John Ward-Perkins in the 1970s (Pompeii AD 79 (1976)) with the curator(s) of the exhibition taking on the rôle of author(s) of the entire work. This contrasts with the Italian tradition, seen for example in Pompeii. Abitare sotto Vesuvio (edited by M. Borriello, A. d'Ambrosio, S. De Caro and P. G. Guzzo (1996)), which is for multi-authored works that include academic experts from the field — for example Andrew Wallace-Hadrill on ‘Le abitazioni urbane’ or Roger Ling on ‘La Casa del Menandro’ and a host of other academic experts (with their endnotes) — that is then followed by a detailed listing and photographs of the objects from the exhibition. Roberts' book is not like this: the academics are behind the scenes (acknowledged in the foreword), and he draws on the work of experts (appearing in the notes) to present Pompeii to the public. The difference is important in any assessment of the work, and also points to a different relationship in the UK between the museum sector and academia than is apparent in an Italian exhibition catalogue.

The link back to academic research is maintained by R. very successfully to present the streets of Pompeii in ch. 2 and to shift discussion from the streets and into the shops. There is a certain reverence for academia: ‘As some scholars have pointed out …’ (47). So we discover that traffic flow was important to the Romans (46–7), although it would seem equally true that many Pompeians were more interested in preventing traffic flow by blocking streets rather than enabling it. R. produces a description of Pompeii for the public from these academic works, which is a contrast to Mary Beard's commentary on research in Pompeii for the public (Pompeii: Life of a Roman Town (2008), see review by Laurence in JRA 22 (2009), 584–7). When presenting the atrium, we are safely in the world of wealth, patronage, power; here Andrew Wallace-Hadrill's Houses and Society in Pompeii and Herculaneum (1994) — that has survived some twenty years since its publication — and Latin texts inform the reader of the thinking of the ancients. Hence, R.'s book acts as a mirror of academia and tends to offer a quite conservative vision of Pompeii, seeking to agree with academia — itself a place of fundamental disagreement even over the use of the words atrium and cubiculum drawn from texts and applied to spaces in Pompeii (P. Allison, AJA 105 (2001), 1–28). There is a sense in reading R.'s book that one is seeing academic ideas pass by with the addition of lavish colour illustrations, so often absent from scholarly publications. This aspect of the book is a strength rather than a weakness — it does communicate a whole range of academic ideas to the public and at the same time allows academics to read critically those ideas with the addition of cleverly researched illustrations (for example, fig. 105: Lararium from the House of the Lararium of the River Sarnus).

What shines through in this book is R.'s enthusiasm for the objects that substantiate the description of Pompeii — when he discusses washing, grooming, toilets and beauty routines to name but a few topics. He has an ability to present the illustrated example that brings the activity found in a Latin text to life (for example, Ovid, Art of Love 3.209–10 on p. 132). Mostly, this is done by the juxtaposition of texts and objects — again an approach that has been strongly criticized (P. Allison, ‘Labels for ladles: interpreting the material culture from Roman households’, in P. Allison (ed.), The Archaeology of Household Activities (1999), 57–77). This shows not a weakness of the book but a weakness in our understanding, or absence of interest, in how objects were deployed in texts by Latin authors and the variation in the literary deployment of words referring to objects. The fact that such objects appear in texts is of itself interesting and makes a statement about the materiality of the first century a.d. The book through its description allows us to once again appreciate how many questions are unresolved in Pompeii and just how much of our interpretation continues to rely on the survival of the relatively few Latin texts from antiquity: Ovid, Pliny and Vitruvius. At the end of reading the book, the pictures claim our attention and cause us to read around them to understand their significance. This is very much a book of an exhibition for the public.