The belief that ours is the most gloriously modern of ages, rooted in reason and revelling in novelty, is so widely held that Ferdinand Mount’s elegant riposte comes as something of a shock. It is disconcerting to think that we’ve been here before, that the ancients were absorbed by exactly the same sorts of fads and foibles that enliven and trouble our lives today, that in so many ways we are them and they us.

Think of the cult of the celebrity. You can trace a line directly from the mawkish excesses of the public’s reaction to Jade Goody’s illness and death last year, to the extraordinary aftermath of the death in AD 130 of Hadrian’s lover Antinous. So distraught was the Roman emperor that he founded a city bearing the handsome lad’s name, a vast project three miles in circumference, every column along the mile-long main street bearing his statue. Napoleon’s surveyor Jomard counted 1,344 busts or statues of Antinous in two streets alone. Seventy cities across the empire rushed to erect temples in his honour. His profile even popped up on Roman coins. Antinous was duly deified, the last non-imperial mortal to be made a god. Celebrity culture gone mad, as the tabloids might put it.

Talking of religion, today’s spiritually consumerist pick-and-mix smorgasbord recalls the panoply of choices for the inquisitive Roman. On the one hand there was official religion, on the other were the clutches of cults and the widespread worship of Mithras, Isis, Serapis and a host of others. For anyone who thinks astrologers belong firmly in the ancient world, when they enjoyed enormous authority under the Romans, remember Ronald Reagan consulting his pet astrologer Jean Quigley on weighty matters of state, such as exactly when to sign the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty in 1987. Then there is Cherie Blair and her feng-shui expert, her magic pendant that served as a Bioelectric Shield and her attachment to the New Age guru Carole Caplin. Across the Atlantic, Sarah Palin, George Bush and Barack Obama all profess born-again experiences.

Mount mounts a compelling and amusing case for parallels between the sexual free-for-all of ancient Greece and Rome and the no-strings-attached world of today’s “zipless fuck”, a phrase he enjoys so much he can’t help spraying it across a memorable chapter on The Bedroom. He reminds us of the Neo-Pagan yearning for a return to the sexual laissez-faire of the ancient world, quoting Lytton Strachey’s exuberant response to reading Plato’s Symposium in 1896, wishing he had sat at the feet of Socrates and seen the Athenian statesman and general Alcibiades. In EM Forster’s Maurice, when undergraduates reach the part of Plato’s Phaedrus in which he describes same-sex passion with poetic force, the teacher remarks with wearily Christian fervour: “Omit: a reference to the unspeakable vice of the Greeks.” The ancients may not have been forever capering around with erect penises to the fore, yet their sexual behaviour and thinking were a world away from the joyless Christian dogma of sex and original sin.

Ancient baths and today’s spa “experiences” and “pampering”; Socratic dialogue and trial by Paxman; the Greek gymnasium and our cult of fitness; pretentious galloping gourmets such as Archestratus, devotee of grey mullet and sea bass, and the obsessive creations of Heston Blumenthal. However dispiriting it may be to acknowledge, it’s hard to duck the conclusion of this splendid book that we’ve been here before, that the Christian-dominated space between the ancients and our era was a strange, normal-rules-do-not-apply interregnum.

It reminds me of the wise observation by Joseph Brodsky in Of Grief and Reason, not mentioned here, that “one of the saddest things that ever transpired in the course of our civilisation was the confrontation between Greco-Roman polytheism and Christian monotheism, and its known outcome”, an altercation that was neither intellectually nor spiritually necessary.

Patrick Hennessey was one of the British army’s self-proclaimed Bright Young Things, an Oxford graduate with a lust for combat and a literary bent. Born in 1982, he belongs to a generation of uniformed men and women who would, as he puts it, ‘do more and see more in five years than our fathers and uncles had packed into twenty-two on manoeuvres in Germany and rioting in Ulster’. Hard on the older generation, perhaps, but such have been the opportunities afforded by the War on Terror.

The Junior Officers’ Reading Club charts Hennessey’s four-year journey from the square-bashing of Sandhurst to front-line duty in Iraq and Afghanistan as a Grenadier Guards Platoon Commander and Operations Officer, and his subsequent departure from the army. If the journey itself is unremarkable — the usual suspects of barking Non-Commissioned Officers, a general disdain for Rear Echelon Motherfuckers or REMFs, high-octane thrills of men with guns and the camaraderie forged under fire are all present and correct — what impresses is the sheer candour and immediacy of his reporting. A literary soldier, especially one still in his twenties rather than a bewhiskered sixtysomething general penning his memoirs, is something to be treasured.

We can therefore excuse the gung-ho tone of much of the book. This is a young man fortunate enough, unlike so many soldiers of a previous generation who missed out on a good war, to be doing just what he has always dreamed of. During one particularly intense fight with ‘Terence’ Taliban in Afghanistan, he says he wants to sit down with the Major who has come along for the ride and try to understand the adrenaline and euphoria of it all and ask what could possibly compare.

‘…the winning goal scoring punch, the first kiss, the triumphant knicker-peeling moment? Nowhere else sells bliss like this, surely? Not in freefall jumps or crisp blue waves, not on dance floors in pills or white lines — I want to discuss with him whether it’s sexually charged because it’s the ultimate affirmation of being alive…’

The answer is very little or nothing can compare because war is uniquely different. It confers an experience that those who have not donned uniform can ever quite understand. As the Company Sergeant Major puts it in a dash of graffiti at the Sangin District Centre when the tour comes to an end, ‘for those who have fought for it, life will always have a flavour the sheltered cannot taste’.
Hennessey’s generation is naturally the most media-savvy there has ever been. The Inkerman Company’s exploits are scrupulously and tirelessly recorded on camera so the officers and men can make video montages to impress friends and girlfriends back home.

‘We went into battle in bandanas and shades with Penguin Classics in our webbing, sketch pads in our daysacks and iPods on the radio, thinking we knew better than what had gone before,’ he writes. Hennessey is driven by the glamour of it all, from Sandhurst to Iraq and into deployment in Afghanistan. After the tedium of all that drill, the relentless boredom of waiting and hoping for action which is the soldier’s lot, killing the enemy is ‘fun’, never mind the rights and wrongs of the conflict,
which are not discussed.

There is an inevitability about the reality-check which comes of seeing comrades killed and grotesquely injured. Casualties become shockingly regular. We don’t know whether Hennessey’s virtual reading club included Herodotus, history’s first war reporter, but the irrepressible Greek put his finger on it in lines that ring as true today as when he wrote them 2,500 years ago: ‘No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace — in peace sons bury fathers, but in war fathers bury sons.’

As Hennessey contemplates the carnage around him, the tone becomes darker, more measured and reflective, a welcome and sensitive contrast to the flippant banter, dripping with irony, that has come before. These passages are some of the most important and affecting in what ultimately proves to be a very fine book, a powerful despatch from the front line and required reading for the families of those in the armed forces. Let us hope his move into conflict and international humanitarian law will provide material for future books because he would be an amusing, probably caustic, observer of the field.

A final note. When I called the Panorama producer Hennessey accuses of being a little yellow under fire in Afghanistan to check the author’s version of events, he disputed them with a chuckle. He also described Hennessey as the bravest man he had ever met.

Land of Marvels: A Novel by Barry Unsworth (Hutchinson, £18.99)

JOHN Somerville is an English archaeologist working in the deserts of Mesopotamia on the brink of the First World War. After years of disappointment in the subterranean world of history, he is pinning his hopes on this latest excavation.

His funds are running out and time isn’t on his side. He is hoping for fame but is braced for disaster. This is his last chance.

The German-funded Baghdad railway linking Constantinople to the Persian Gulf is getting inexorably nearer. Its route looks likely to smash through the ancient mound of mud and rock that holds the key to Somerville’s future.

Another man keeping a beady eye on proceedings is Jehar, an unscrupulous Bedouin in the archaeologist’s pay. He, too, hopes to make his fortune, with which he will be able to pay the elusive bride-price of 100 pounds demanded by the uncle of Ninanna, a beautiful Circassian girl.

Somerville’s wife Edith, deeply conventional yet unfulfilled, wonders about the future of her marriage in the stultifying heat of the desert.

Into the fray steps Alex Elliott, a breezy American geologist-cum-corporate sleuth posing as an archaeologist, ostensibly working for British interests on a top-secret mission from the cynical financier Lord Rampling while concealing his own darker motives. In Edith’s eyes, at least, Elliott brings with him a refreshing whiff of glamour and excitement.

After a midnight, moonlit ride out into the desert, she succumbs to the romance of the setting and the enigmatic stranger, and the two embark on a fleeting affair.

While Britain, France, Germany and the United States plot to carve up the disintegrating Ottoman Empire, Somerville’s dig starts to take on greater significance.

The hitherto unremarkable mound starts to reveal itself as something infinitely more history-making. It looks like an ancient Assyrian palace containing a wholly unexpected royal tomb. As the archaeological prize grows by the day, promising to launch Somerville into international stardom, the railway continues to approach and the Englishman unaware of his wife’s night-time wanderings with the American impostor feels his own impending doom.

Outside Mesopotamia questions begin to be asked about Elliott. Suspicions as to his true intentions are raised. Is he working for the Germans? For Lord Rampling, the American’s reports on oil in the desert represent the prospect of a personal financial windfall and a patriotic triumph for Britain. They cannot be jeopardised for one moment. The American has to be assassinated.

Tensions mount in the desert as spies and assassins join the cast of soldiers and archaeologists, and the story hurtles on towards its fiery denouement.

Unsworth’s novel abounds with parallels between pre-war Mesopotamia and present-day Iraq. In Rampling’s words, “What was it Churchill had said…? Mastery itself is the prize. Prophetic words. He who owns the oil will own the world, he will rule the sea and the land, he will rule his fellow men.

The day will come when oil will be more desired, more sought after than gold.” Who said history never repeats itself ?