This elegant book is many things at once: a surprising chapter in the history of ideas, a collection of snappy new interpretations of key Greek and Latin texts from Horace's Odes to Gellius’ Attic Nights, and a deviant experiment in Reception Studies. It takes as its hook the Western, late capitalist love affair with diversity, consumer choice and constant hyper-stimulation: in the modern world, as we flit from one small screen to another, our ever-shrinking attention spans seize on titbits in an increasingly complex miscellany. William Fitzgerald's project, which begins with the claim ‘variety needs rescuing’ (1), seems rather prophetically both to celebrate and to mark the demise of that millennial spirit captured in the bestselling Schott's Miscellanies (2002–2011) and under direct assault now from far-right and protectionist movements which seem determined to purify, demarcate and separate: the motto of the EU, in varietate Concordia, alongside centuries-old metaphors of the US as a ‘melting pot’ or ‘crucible’, feels far more fragile and questionable in 2017 than it did in early 2016, when Variety was in press.

In five chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, F. attempts to ‘bring into focus’ a term familiar to readers of classical Latin literature yet rarely examined as much more than a decorative poetic or rhetorical device designed to ward off tedium: varietas. The book feels around the concept — or category, aesthetic value, experience, metaphor — of variety to produce a suggestive account not just of its cultural and political specificity in (mainly) classical Latin texts, against a backdrop of Rome as a dazzling microcosm of multi-faceted empire, but also of its forgotten inheritance in English and Romance languages and their literatures. F.’s statement in the opening pages that his approach ‘sits awkwardly with current scholarly trends’ (6) (he refers to the debunking of a ‘Classical Tradition’ in favour of ‘Reception Studies’, with its emphasis on the active and transformative reception of antiquity rather than on the lasting impact of authority or tradition) is a mischievous provocation, a faux-conservative red herring. But what it points to is the need to be more precise and imaginative in the critical accounts we give of the multiple inter-relationships that gravitate around and animate key terms like varietas, together with their modern relations. In this, F. is exemplary. He recognizes that such a history is liable to be as much about managing and self-consciously enacting a ‘varietas complex’, which generates as well as names a series of conceptual and critical problems, as it is about describing the experience or phenomenon from a scholarly distance. The resulting dance, which flouts chronology as it leaps and slides from Catullus to Manley Hopkins, Horace to Matthew Arnold, Virgil to Shakespeare via Coleridge and Macrobius, is always aware of the engulfing threat as well as seductive lure of varietas as it is being investigated and produced here. After mapping structures of inter-related words, ideas and tropes (varietas-varius-variatio, copia, concordia discors, poikilia-poikilos, polyeideia, metabolē) in two broad, variegated foundation chapters, F. sticks to a loose tripartite architecture for chs 3–5: author (Lucretius, Horace, Pliny, who all make variety an issue, in ch. 3), genre (on Horatian lyric, Roman verse satire, and Flavian panegyric in the form of Statius’ Silvae, in ch. 4), and the book (an extension of F.’s recent work on Martial's Epigrams, expanding to take in the ancient miscellany, and finally Aulus Gellius’ Noctes Atticae, in ch. 5).

Variety emerges not just as distraction, artifice or pleasure, but as a game of fine lines in which belief systems, identities, models for engagement with different spheres of civic and political life (Pliny, Horace) or with nature (Lucretius) are moulded and negotiated. It becomes a tool for imagining and experimenting with different orders, patterns, limits, interactions and experiences (of plurality, distinctiveness, intercourse or blending), and poses itself as a nexus of questions. There is, naturally, an abundance of detail, and a short review is hard pressed to select the richest morsels. Highlights must feature F.’s deft reading of Pliny's Letters (84–100), where it is argued that an aesthetic of variety allows Pliny to process and reframe the difficulties of managing an authorial identity and public persona, in a society of praise in which achieving distinction and pleasing the right people in the right way might not always be compatible ambitions.

Some readers, no doubt, would prefer a more rigorous methodology and taxonomy, and will find F.’s ‘bouncing around’ between periods and talk of swirling energy fields flakily unphilological. Mistaking varietas for levitas (as F. puns, ‘variety takes everyone for a ride’), such readers would risk overlooking the immense learning and critical acumen with which F., as he says, ‘put(s) variety into play’ (6) through the texts he reads so closely. But more crucially, they would miss the point that F. strives to make and moreover would not be able to make as effectively in a more traditional format or voice — that variety and miscellany are persistent yet live concepts that have to do with how writers think about form, timing, the relationship of part to whole, and of one element to another (or one individual to another, within a community), a process that calls for and is inseparable from readers’ or audiences’ participation, their ethical, moral and political self-positioning, and their desire to make sense of the world. F.’s shifting attention is performative and heuristic: herein lies the real provocation and stimulus of this timely, impressive book.