- Quondam Fellow, All Souls College (from 1981)
- Fifty-Pound Fellow, All Souls College (from 1980 to 1981)
- Prize Fellow, All Souls College (from 1972 to 1979)
- Undergraduate, Balliol College, Oxford (from 1967 to 1971)
- Classical reception, especially in the nineteenth century
- Latin poetry
- Roman cultural history
- Classical Literature (London: Penguin, 2015 / New York: Basic Books, 2016)
- God, Space and City in the Roman Imagination (Oxford: OUP, 2013)
- A Fine Brush on Ivory: an appreciation of Jane Austen (Oxford: OUP, 2004)
- Westminster Abbey (Profile Books Ltd, 2004)
- Virgil’s Experience: Nature and History; Times, Names and Places (Oxford: OUP, 1998)
- (ed.) The Legacy of Rome: A New Appraisal (Oxford: OUP, 1992)
- Classical Epic: Homer and Virgil (Bristol Classical Press [now Bloomsbury], 1992)
- Dignity and Decadence: Victorian Art and the Classical Inheritance (Harper Collins, 1991)
- Three Classical Poets: Sappho, Catullus and Juvenal (Duckworth, 1982)
- Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship 2007-10.
