This thesis is concerned with two books of narrative history, The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents and Pompeii: The Living City, both written by me during the 2000s, the latter co-authored with Ray Laurence. Pompeii (2005) explores life in the Colonia Veneria Pompeiana, a provincial Italian city, in the middle of the first century CE, during the period prior to the eruption of Vesuvius in 69 CE. The World That Never Was (2009) offers an account of the Anarchist movement and its complex relationship with the police and intelligence services across an international diaspora during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beginning with the Paris Commune of 1871.