- Published: 30 September 2012
- ISBN: 9781448139507
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 432
Cleopatra
Queen, Lover, Legend
- Published: 30 September 2012
- ISBN: 9781448139507
- Imprint: Vintage Digital
- Format: EBook
- Pages: 432
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, Observer
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
Observer
Lucy Hughes-Hallett... throws a searching light on two thousand years of male erotic fantasy
Joan Smith, New Statesman
Lucy Hughes-Hallett's brilliant and discursive study of Cleopatra
Antonia Fraser, Sunday Times
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
John Updike, New York Times
Richly entertaining and thought-provoking... a fascinating and humorous work... Every Antony should read it
Times Literary Supplement
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