It is hard to think of a better travel book written this century

Shadow of the Silk Road is a work of boundless riches. Every paragraph carries a captivating phrase...offering up an understanding of our world today that is as immediate as tomorrow's news, yet infinitely profound

One of Thubron's great strengths is his compassion...his shimmering prose creates a wonderful book, so multilayered that, when I reached the end, I wanted to read it all over again

Rich in humour, compassion and history, another confirmation, if any more were needed, that Thubron is the pre-eminent travel writer of his generation

A poetic volume - interesting, shocking and deeply engaging, the work of a mature writer at the top of his game

Thubron is a very hardy traveller, and a very fine writer...[it is] a book of exceptional erudition, adventure and elegance

Thubron makes his way with an appealing blend of self-doubt and erudition; he is willing, he is patient,; he knows he cannot resolve but he can attempt to decipher.... He is the reliable storyteller we needed in place of Marco Polo. His stock in trade makes him invaluable to us

Haunting, elegiac, melancholy, magical

An exquisitely written work of great profundity

Shadow of the Silk Road is an astonishing achievement - both the journey and the book. Mr Thubron's tenacity, endurance, stamina and erudition metamorphose into exquisite prose. This is harder to achieve than one might think and can only be the result of huge effort and skill

To those of us addicted to the thrill of travel, that unique and irresistible rush induced by journeying into the unknown, Colin Thubron is God....his socio-political savvy is impeccable, his local knowledge faultless...What a journey, what a book

Impresses with its scholarship and literary craft

Superb...Cleopatra led an epic life, and Schiff captures its sweep and scope in a vigorous narrative aimed at the general reader yet firmly anchored in modern scholarship. The author's greatest strengths remain the lucid intelligence and subtle analysis of personality...Schiff reanimates [Cleopatra] as a living, breathing woman: utterly extraordinary, to be sure, but recognizably human.

Stacy Schiff draws a portrait worthy of her subject's own wit and learning...Ms. Schiff manages to tell Cleopatra's story with a balance of the tragic and the hilarious...[and] does a rare thing: She gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist.

Captivating...Ms. Schiff strips away the accretions of myth that have built up around the Egyptian queen and plucks off the imaginative embroiderings of Shakespeare, Shaw and Elizabeth Taylor. In doing so, she gives us a cinematic portrait of a historical figure far more complex and compelling than any fictional creation, and a wide, panning, panoramic picture of her world....Writing with verve and style and wit, Ms. Schiff recreates Cleopatra's lavish courting of Antony (including one dinner in which there was a knee-deep expanse of roses and some of the attendees received not gift baskets but furniture and horses decked out in silver-plated trappings) and his even more extravagant offerings to her (including the library of Pergamum and a host of territories which gave her dominion over Cyprus, portions of Crete and all but two cities of the thriving Phoenician coast). For that matter, Ms. Schiff even manages to make us see afresh famous scenes like Antony's painful death after his defeat at the hands of Octavian, and Cleopatra's subsequent suicide.

A swift, sympathetic life of one of history's most maligned and legendary women.