About the work

A closer look.

Read one before you pay for one. "The Face Under the Steps" is a finished brief I wrote on the bronze head of Augustus that spent some 1,900 years under a temple stair at Meroe, in Sudan. About 900 words, and every claim is pinned to a named source: the British Museum's record for object 1911,0901.1, Strabo 17.53-54, and Augustus' own Res Gestae. It opens: "The object is unremarkable in its material. Bronze, 46 centimetres high, about seventeen kilos: a man's head, turned slightly, the face of Augustus Caesar as a young man, cut clean at the neck. The British Museum registered it in 1911 under a number that gives no hint of what it has been through. 1911,0901.1." The rest does what a brief is for: it separates what the evidence says from what the story has added, and it tells you which parts are still argued over. Now yours. Name one specific thing you keep half-remembering and have never checked: a date, a place, a quote, a family story, a claim someone repeats at dinner. What you get: one written brief, 600-1,000 words, within 72 hours, with a source line and a date on every fact, and one revision included. If the thing turns out to be a myth, that is the answer you get. I show you where the story came from and what the record actually says, instead of writing around it.