I’m a guest blogger this week over at Starburst, discussing Roman law, the history of slavery and allegories of zombie outbreak in the Roman Republic. There’s also a chance to win a copy of my Spartacus novel.

And that’s not all, for there’s another guest blog from me over at A Temporary Distraction, this time analysing my love of the earthy language of Spartacus — probably the only time you’ll see someone discussing Derek Jarman, gladiators’ groupies and the use of the indefinite article all in on the same page. If you’ve ever wanted to know about how to insult someone’s mother in Latin, now’s your chance.

ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED? If that’s not enough, I appear yet again over at Blogomatic 3000, this time discussing the pitfalls of writing something that has to displease all readers equally. How obscene is too obscene, in a world where people get their faces hacked off? I hasten to clarify, when I say in this piece “crushed and broken by empire”, I’m using “empire” in its post-colonial studies sense as a “decentred and deterritorialising apparatus”. Spartacus lived at the time of the Roman Republic, of course, but the empire was already on its way.

And yet another, over at What Culture, where I talk about the nature of time in television. Probably the only time that EastEnders, Downton Abbey and Spartacus get mentioned in the same piece.

One more for luck: here’s me over at SF Review, discussing the sort of picture you see when you walk into the National Museum of the Philippines. Now, what on Earth does that have to do with Spartacus and “empire”…?