Tom Holland is the author of Rubicon: The Triumph and Tragedy of the Roman Republic, which won the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History and was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize. Persian Fire, his history of the Graeco-Persian wars, won the Anglo-Hellenic League's Runciman Award in 2006. His third work of history, Millennium: The End of the World and the Forging of Christendom, was published in the autumn of 2008. In the Shadow of the Sword (2012), covers the collapse of Roman and Persian power in the Near East, and the emergence of Islam. Thumbnail credit: Unknown, via article "The 'futurist' aesthetics of ISIS" distributed under CC-4.0