Cleopatra

'Brilliant and discursive' Antonia Fraser, Sunday Times

'Hughes-Hallett's exemplary reappraisal … throws a searching light on two thousand years of male erotic fantasy' Joan Smith, New Statesman

Winner of the FAWCETT PRIZE and EMILY TOTH AWARD

In the 2,000 years since her death, Cleopatra has been recreated over and over again by poets, artists and filmmakers, each time in a form that fits the prejudices, anxieties and yearnings of the age that produced it. To Chaucer she was the model of a good wife, while to Cecil B. DeMille she was ‘the wickedest woman in history’.

In this revised edition of Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s award-winning cultural history, the real Cleopatra – one of the most powerful women in the ancient world – is skilfully revealed alongside a legion of imaginary counterparts and the sexual, racial and political messages they carry.

Reviews

‘This is a gripping book. Hughes Hallett is magnificently scholarly, yet she writes with ease and fluency … 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

‘Lucy Hughes-Hallett's exemplary reappraisal brings a trenchant intelligence to bear on the subject … and throws a searching light on two thousand years of male erotic fantasy’ Joan Smith, New Statesman

‘Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s richly entertaining and thought-provoking book is a fascinating and humorous work … Every Antony should read it’ Times Literary Supplement

‘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’ Observer

‘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 extravagance of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s jet-set reprise of Antony and Cleopatra an essay on the spiritual worth of prodigality, seen as a Rabelaisian Dionysian ‘holy foolishness’ that liberates us from those oppressive old Roman values’ John Updike, New York Times

About the author

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is the author of The Pike, a biography of Gabriele d'Annunzio, which won the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non Fiction, the Costa Biography Award, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Paddy Power Political Biography of the Year Award. Her other books are Cleopatra: Histories, Dreams and Distortions and Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett is also a respected critic and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She lives in London.