Reading Daisy Dunn’s ambitious first book, a biography of the salty (in more ways than one) Roman poet Catullus, it struck me how lucky we are: only one copy of his collection of poems survived the ages, hidden under a bushel in Verona.

Catullus might have gone the way of his contemporaries, such as Cinna, whose lynching is immortalised in Julius Caesar, and whose poems are now dust.