I suspect husband's was from Colleen McCollough's Last Man in Rome series.
Marg cheated! She knows I'm reading McCollough's
Masters of Rome series right now. Still I kept to the rules and it was the book closest to me, the book is
Caesar's Women, fourth in a series of seven or eight books srt in Rome from about 100 BC to about 45 BC.
For those who know their history; the first starts with the rise of Gaius Marius and traces the lives (the back stories if you like) of the great men of Rome through the downfall of Republican Rome and finishing up with Octavian adopting the name of Caesar Augustus. Historically it only moderately accurate but is good enough that I learned enough to be able to ask the right questions.
The series is McCollough at her very considerable best.
Thorn Birds (while still very, very good) is a comic book by comparison.
Just as well I didn't get this challenge during my lunch break at work or you would have got something like this...
"
Labelling experiments have subsequently supported the postulates that the aristocholic acids are biogenetically related to aporphine alkaloids and the nitro and carboxyl groups are metabolic relics of the hetero ring of the aporphine system. Strictly, this is the fourth, not the fifth sentence but there's only four sentences on the page!
Can anyone guess what I'm reading here?
Marg's Man