Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions

‘This is a gripping book. Hughes Hallett is magnificently scholarly, yet she writes with ease and fluency … A fascinating account of the way in which succeeding generations have seen Cleopatra; as virtuous suicide, inefficient housewife, exuberant lover, professional courtesan, scheming manipulator, femme fatale, incarnation of Isis and bimbo’ Economist

‘Lucy Hughes-Hallett's exemplary reappraisal brings a trenchant intelligence to bear on the subject … and throws a searching light on two thousand years of male erotic fantasy’ Joan Smith, New Statesman

‘Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s richly entertaining and thought-provoking book is a fascinating and humorous work … Every Antony should read it’ Times Literary Supplement

‘In this shimmering study Lucy Hughes-Hallett shows how Cleopatra’s image was constantly amended by prevailing female fashions, political morality, sexual neuroses. Cleopatra is brilliant and wily’ Observer

‘The world's most famous beauty, for whom the world was well lost, turns out to have been less of a siren, more of a Caesar, in Lucy Hughes-Hallett's entertaining and thoughtful study’ Marina Warner, Independent on Sunday

‘Quite brilliantly the author elicits from the extravagance of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s jet-set reprise of Antony and Cleopatra an essay on the spiritual worth of prodigality, seen as a Rabelaisian Dionysian ‘holy foolishness’ that liberates us from those oppressive old Roman values’ John Updike, New York Times