Persian Fire - First World Empire And The Battle For The West

History. Tom Holland's brilliant new book describes the very first "clash of empires" between East and West. As he did in the critically praised Rubicon, he has found extraordinary parallels between the ancient world and our own. There is no other popular history that takes in the entire sweep of the Persian Wars, and no other classical historian, academic or popular, who combines scholarly rigor with novelistic depth and a worldly irony in quite the fashion that Tom Holland does.