Frankie Howerd sent it up and Doctor Who has been. Engulfed and embalmed by the eruption of Vesuvius in AD79, the Roman town of Pompeii has been iconic since it was rediscovered, and excavations began, in 1748. It was an important part of Grand Tours in the 18th and 19th centuries. Today three million people enjoy, and exhaust, the site each year. There have been successful novels about it from Lord Lytton’s of 1843 to Robert Harris’s of 2003. The new Cambridge Latin Course follows the life of one resident of Pompeii, Lucius Caecilius Iucundus, to his fiery end. Our fascination with this provincial town, estimated here at only 12,000 souls, does not grow old.

So Beard, a Cambridge classicist, is standing on well-trodden ground. How does she fare? To the vast field of Pompeiana she brings the human touch. The thrust of her account and its well-turned prose is towards the people of Pompeii and the way they lived — and died. “In the back rooms of one substantial house, the remains of 12 people were discovered . . . They included a girl in her late teens, who had been nine months pregnant when she died, the bones of her foetus still lying in her abdomen.”

Commanding the latest research, Beard’s nine chapters return the dead to life. She gives us, for example, a baker, a banker and a fish-sauce maker. We learn as much as there is to know about the women of Pompeii, from Nigella who was a pig-keeper to Faustilla, a pawnbroker.

Preferring facts to fancies, Beard shows that many of our preconceptions about Pompeii are wrong. She proves the famous lavatory sponge to be a means, but not the only one, of wiping Roman bottoms. She warns us “against taking the literate veneer of Pompeii too much at face value”. She corrects the view that the wealthy inhabitants of Pompeii “espoused an austere modernist aesthetic”. She questions the image of the town as bursting with brothels, and argues that many of Pompeii’s supposed bars “were really grocery shops or the like”.

This absorbing, inquisitive and affectionate account of Pompeii is a model of its kind. Beard has caught the quick of what was and, in our lives today, remains the same.

Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town by Mary Beard Profile, £9.99; Buy this book; 416pp

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