Marco MacManus

Marco MacManus grew up in the west of Ireland and has spent much of his adult life absorbed by the history of the ancient Mediterranean world, with a particular fascination for the periods when empires and religions were simultaneously being born and broken apart. He came to the Bar Kokhba Revolt through a long engagement with Roman provincial history and the archaeology of the Judaean Desert, and found in it a story that seemed to him to stand at the hinge of the Western world - the moment when two great traditions that had shared a common origin became permanently distinct. He lives in County Clare, where he writes narrative history about the ancient world. The Star and the Sword is one of several books he has written on the history of the Roman east and its religious transformations.