"...You can see why, once he has mentally pulled on his toga and sandals, Harris communicates such a strong sense of imperial Rome - the book is awesomely well-informed about the minutiae of everyday life, but in a vivid, not a tedious way - and why the narrative verve is so infectious. This is a subject Harris has lived with for about nine years now (give or take time out to write The Ghost), and it shows." (The Guardian)

"Lustrum stands on its own merits as a thoroughly engaging historical novel. Republican Rome, with all its grandeur and corruption, has rarely been made as vivid as it appears in Harris's book. The allure of power and the perils that attend it have seldom been so brilliantly anatomised in a thriller." (The Sunday Times)

"Harris never makes his comparisons between Rome and modern Britain explicit, but they are certainly there. And that's the principal charm of his ancient thrillers - their up-to-dateness." (The Sunday Telegraph)

"Harris has taken the DNA of Cicero's great speeches and animated them with utterly believable dialogue... Harris's greatest triumph is perhaps in the evocation of Roman politics, the constant bending of ancient principles before the realities of power, and in his depiction of what it was like to live in the city: the mud, the guttering lamps, the smell of the blood from the temples. I wish I had read this book at 13, before I started ploughing through Cicero's speeches. I would take my hat off to Harris, if I hadn't already dashed it to the ground in jealous awe." (Boris Johnson, Mail on Sunday)