Her book has as much in common with Antonia Fraser's Boadicea... It comes, I feel, still closer to Marina's Warner's Monuments and Maidens in its mood and in its spirit, in its careful relation of the visual and verbal. It is a book which builds up pictures in the mind

Lucy Hughes-Hallett... throws a searching light on two thousand years of male erotic fantasy

Richly entertaining and thought-provoking... a fascinating and humorous work... Every Antony should read it

Lucy Hughes-Hallett's brilliant and discursive study of Cleopatra

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

Quite brilliantly the author elicits from the publicised extravagance of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor's real-life, jet-set reprise of Antony and Cleopatra, an essay in the spiritual worth of prodigality, seen as a Rabelaisian Dionysian "holy foolishness" that liberates us from all those oppressive old Roman values

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... a book about fabrication, persuasion. Even in Cleopatra's own lifetime the legends of the monstrous yet enticing female ruler were beginning to accumulate. But we all love Cleopatra

A barnstorming history

This true story has all the ingredients of a John Buchan 1920s thriller

If this doesn't win a major book prize, I will eat my sola topi ... Beautifully counterpoints the spiritual travel experiences of the soon-to-be-famous nurse fleeing an arranged marriage, with the much more lubricious ones of the then-unpublished novelist.

In 1849, Florence Nightingale and author Gustave Flaubert visited Egypt. Anthony Sattin's book recreates the transformative steps towards fame these two took as they simultaneously travelled around Egypt

Highly readable and illuminating ... Mishra's analysis of Muslim reactions is particularly topical

Enormously ambitious but thoroughly readable, this book is essential reading for everyone who is interested in the processes of change that have led to the emergence of today's Asia

Sophisticated ... not so much polemic as cri de coeur, motivated by Mishra's keen sense of the world, East and West, hurtling towards its own destruction

Outstanding ... Mishra wears his scholarship lightly and weaves together the many strands of history into a gripping narrative ... The insights afforded by this book are too many to be enumerated ... Mishra performs a signal service to the future - by making us read the past in a fresh light

[Full of] complexity and nuance

Subtle, erudite and entertaining

Mishra allows the reader to see the events of two centuries anew, through the eyes of the journalists, poets, radicals and charismatics who criss-crossed Europe and Asia

A vital, nuanced argument ... prodigious