This week I’m reading DK’s Ancient Rome: The Definitive Visual History alongside Andrea Penrose’s Murder at Somerset House, which means the historian part of my brain is getting fed from two rather different directions.

On one side, I’m going all the way back to Ancient Rome.

Ancient Rome: The Definitive Visual History is exactly the sort of DK book I can happily lose time in. There’s the larger historical narrative — politics, warfare, empire, religion, society — but what particularly appeals to me about visual histories is the opportunity to stop and look closely at the physical evidence people left behind.

Objects can make the past feel suddenly, startlingly human. Coins, jewellery, household items, inscriptions, sculpture, buildings: they all offer slightly different ways into lives that can otherwise become flattened into emperors, wars and dates. And because this is me, there is every possibility that an interesting artefact will send me off on a completely unrelated historical tangent before I’ve made it another three pages.

Then Murder at Somerset House by Andrea Penrose takes me into a very different historical world: Regency London, filtered through historical mystery.

Historical mysteries always give me two things to think about simultaneously. There’s the story itself — the investigation, the clues, the characters and the inevitable question of who did what to whom — but I’m also paying attention to the world constructed around it. How does the author make the period feel inhabited rather than simply decorated? Which details create that sense of place? And, inevitably, which bits make the historian part of my brain perk up and start asking questions?

That makes this week’s pairing more connected than it initially appears.

One book is trying to reconstruct a vanished world through surviving evidence. The other is using historical research and imagination to create the feeling of living within another vanished world.

Those are very different projects, but both ultimately circle around a question I never really get tired of: how do we get closer to people who lived in a world that no longer exists?

Sometimes it’s through the things they left behind.

Sometimes it’s through the stories we build around what we know.

And sometimes, apparently, somebody gets murdered at Somerset House.

This week’s vibe: Ancient Romans, Regency murder, historian brain fully activated.