This enjoyable, thoughtful and leisurely book aims to re-energise a moribund metaphor, a concept which has, from humble beginnings (derived, some would say, from the Latin uarus, ‘pimple’), become increasingly pervasive through Western cultural history and so fallen into relative triteness: variety, sometimes stylised as diversity, and thus a function of choice, the watchword of late capitalism. As such, the project could have been terrifyingly broad; yet it daintily tiptoes along the thread, often obscure, which connects Latin aesthetics with Anglophone poetry and modern theory, powered by F.’s deft prose. And it is an emblematic tying-up of threads in F.’s previous work, from the study of lyric and Catullus to Martial via slavery, alongside new quests, particularly the unpacking of Gellius, resulting in a dizzying array of texts being presented for our consideration. The enquiry avoids frivolity and diffuseness by being grounded in focused close readings, and the resulting book is, broadly speaking, split into two parts, the first more overtly conceptual and the second somewhat more text-directed.

That said, the first chapter, ‘Words and Meanings’, starts by paying scrupulous attention to appearances of the words ‘various’ and ‘variety’ in English texts beginning with M. Arnold's ‘Dover Beach’ and proceeding to L. MacNeice's ‘Snow’. Then retreat is beaten to the semantic fields of a multiplicity of terms in Latin and Greek, before the argument first settles on the bodily implications of distinguere, as in the livid bruise of the comic slave when beaten, then returns to what is repeatedly labelled the ‘varietas complex’. Throughout, an important distinction seems to be between specific meanings of varius or similar words in context, as opposed to their general meanings – a bifurcated concern which occasionally renders the argument rather bitty. By contrast, the far-reaching second chapter, ‘Variety's Contexts’ (whose plural title oddly differs from the singular reproduced at the top of every right-hand page), does real heavy lifting regarding the applicability of variety to the natural world, to rhetoric, to aesthetics, pleasure, and the aesthetics of pleasure, and then (the most captivating, where ps.-Virgil's Moretum is sandwiched between G. Flaubert's Salammbô and Plato on democracy) to politics: go big or go home. The seemingly scattergun eclecticism of the readings offered here results in a wealth of delectable titbits from disparate periods, especially dazzling on the topic of Christian theodicy, seamlessly integrated with its ancestry from pagan authors. Even sports-writing rates a look in when the discussion alights on ‘sameness’ (p. 51).

The second part of the book is more sedate, though equally perspicacious. The more specific treatments of the works of individual Classical authors in the third chapter, ‘Putting Variety at Issue’, follow ostensibly more conventional patterns. First Pliny, patron saint of mediocrity, comes under the microscope; then follows, almost as an excursus, Lucretius’ celebration of nature in its infinite combinations of atoms, although the brunt of this section taught me more about the opening of J. Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel, Lucretian intertextuality in Catullus 46 and – most remarkably – Gerard Manley Hopkins, an extraordinary subject here because F. explicitly admits that he ‘was probably not influenced by Lucretius’ (p. 106). Such sleight of hand is typical of F.’s impressive reconfiguring of reception as mere affinity. Chapter 3's final quick-fire salvo involves only two passages from Horace: Odes 4.2, where perhaps something could have been made of the oddity in iuuenescit as ‘growing younger’ (v. 55, with M. Putnam, Artifices of Eternity: Horace's Fourth Book of Odes [1986], p. 61), and the opening (though really only two lines) of the Ars Poetica. No loss, though, for Horace is a prime instigator of the fourth chapter, ‘Confronting Variety’, which celebrates the list as a site for the interplay of difference and sameness. This chapter will be required reading on the priamel, and (alongside the earlier arguments about the natural sublime) for Statius’ villa poetry, but once again the collocation of exemplary texts, ranging from erotic elegy (Ovid and Propertius) to Seneca's Phaedra, the ps.-Virgilian Copa and indeed Poliziano, via selected satire, the echt-Roman literature of excess, is truly thought-provoking.

The final chapter, ‘Miscellany’, tackles works, several frequently overlooked, which comprise supposedly unrelated elements, be they poetry or letter collections or sympotically motivated quotation compendia, and finishes with a tantalising and, indeed, useful sampler of ways to analyse Gellius, broached in unorthodox (heterodox?) fashion via Montaigne. Lyric Horace again features prominently, but I learned much about more shadowy figures such as Clement of Alexandria and Pamphile, the latter one of the miscellanists who populate Gellius’ pages, in a sort of mise en abyme. This chapter stands against the totalising impulse which is trendy in the study of Latin literature, where ‘the search for the perfect book’ (to quote A. Barchiesi, p. 151) has overtaken our explications of how works hang together. F. is a sure guide here, even if this reader felt that an inordinate amount of space is lavished on the issue of titles. But this is a question of taste, which in no way obviates the importance and relevance of F.’s work, however amorphous its subject may have seemed at first glance. Add to this the methodological beef with current reception studies (opposing the oft-repeated mantra that ‘meaning is constituted at the point of reception’ with ‘meaning inheres in the tools that are available’, p. 198), and it is clear that the melding of subject and approach, while it might take some getting used to, has far-reaching implications for our texts from ancient to modern, in a-historical dialogue with each other. Literary criticism, then, is revamped by F. as a matter of sensitive subjectivity which resists conformity and hierarchy (and even expertise): perhaps appropriately so, when the panoply of authors present themselves as multifarious and inexplicable human actors. After all, F. treats Joshua Reynolds as a conservative who wrote to condemn the stylistic application of variety to the depiction of nature (pp. 37–8); yet Thomas Gainsborough could say of Reynolds, ‘Damn the fellow, how various he is’ (J. Lindsay, Thomas Gainsborough: His Life and Art [1981], p. 122).

Errors are few in a work of this simultaneous density and sweep (e.g. p. 145, ‘Certainly this is a copia is enlivened’; p. 195, ‘World is the potential for different encounters’; p. 199, ‘tendencty’; p. 233, ‘Episolography’). Typographically speaking, I was not a massive fan of the decision to employ English transliterations for Greek throughout. And the three-page index could have done with expansion to match the book's ambition (lacking, for instance, an entry for zeugma, ‘miscellany's emblematic figure of speech’, p. 191).