Cleopatra - Lucy Hughes-Hallett

'Her book has much in common with Antonia Fraser's BOADICEA. . . It comes, I feel, still closer to Marina Warner's MONUMENTS AND MAIDENS in its mood and spirit, in its careful relation of the visual and verbal. It is a book which builds up pictures in the mind. ' Fiona MacCarthy, OBSERVER Even in her own lifetime Cleopatra was the subject of a double fiction, being reinvented in the propeganda of her enemies as a depraved, alien temptress and in her own self-glamorizing ceremonial as a godess, a universal mother and a liberator. In the two thousand years since her death she had been recreated over and over again, each time in a form that fits the prejudices and fantasiesof the age that produced it. 'Lucy Hughes-Hallett throws a searching light on two thousand years of male erotic fantasy. ' Joan Smith NEW STATESMAN 'It is a fascinating and humourous work. . . every Antony should read it. ' TLS