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  • Published: 30 September 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448139507
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432
Categories:

Cleopatra

Queen, Lover, Legend




'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

  • Published: 30 September 2012
  • ISBN: 9781448139507
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 432
Categories:

About the author

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a cultural historian and critic. She is the author of Cleopatra, Queen, Lover, Legend and of Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. She reviews regularly for the Sunday Times Books Section.

Praise for Cleopatra

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