Author:Lucy Hughes-Hallett
'This is a gripping book... 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
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
—— Fiona MacCarthy , ObserverLucy Hughes-Hallett... throws a searching light on two thousand years of male erotic fantasy
—— Joan Smith , New StatesmanRichly entertaining and thought-provoking... a fascinating and humorous work... Every Antony should read it
—— Times Literary SupplementLucy Hughes-Hallett's brilliant and discursive study of Cleopatra
—— Antonia Fraser , Sunday TimesThe 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 SundayQuite 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
—— John Updike , New York TimesIn 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
—— ObserverCompelling...Told with great skill by Diana Preston. There are personalities and discoveries, enterprises and adventures, colour and detail, and naturally there are moral dilemmas. But the lasting impression, implied in the subtitle and enhanced by the fluency of the tale, is of inevitability.
—— New StatesmanA concise and very readable overview of the human chain reaction that began in 1896 with the innocent observation that uranium salts could fog a photographic plate and culminated half a century later in the most potent weapon the world had ever seen.
—— Washington PostDeGroot tells the story of the American lunar mission with verve and elegance
—— Richard Aldous , Irish TimesFascinating, gossipy and occasionally hilarious
—— Jeffrey Taylor , Express