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

Lucy Hughes-Hallett... throws a searching light on two thousand years of male erotic fantasy

Joan Smith, New Statesman

Richly entertaining and thought-provoking... a fascinating and humorous work... Every Antony should read it

Times Literary Supplement

Lucy Hughes-Hallett's brilliant and discursive study of Cleopatra

Antonia Fraser, Sunday Times

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

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

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