The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt.
Her palace shimmered with onyx and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Cleopatra, shrewd strategist and ingenious negotiator; though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.
She was married twice, each time to one of her own brothers. She waged a brutal civil war against the first; she poisoned the second. Incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. Cleopatra had a son with Caesar and – after his murder – three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.
Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way the supple personality has been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order a generation before the birth of Christ. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.
About the Author
Stacy Schiff is the author of Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov), winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Saint-Excupéry, a Pulitzer Prizefinalist; and A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France and the Birth of America,winner of the George Washington Book Prize, the Ambassador Award in American Studies, and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Institut Français d’Améruque. All three were New York Times Notable Books; the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the Chicago Tribune, and The Economist also named A Great Improvisation a Best Book of the Year. The biographies have been published in a host of foreign editions.
Industry Reviews
Under [Schiff's] pen, the mirage of Cleopatra shimmers down the deserts of time and suddenly stands before us, in new and thrilling sharp focus ... full of well researched context and much learned speculation -- Jan Moir * Daily Mail *
We see a great queen painted in dazzling colours in the twilight of a dazzling kingdom ... new life is breathed into an indisputably authentic icon * Sunday Times *
An inspired combination of carefully parsed texts, new research and pulse-quickening descriptive writing ... formidable and spellbinding achievement * Guardian *
[Schiff] has done her homework and writes elegantly and wittily, creating truly evocative word pictures. * Independent *
Schiff has produced a highly literary, imaginative, coherent narrative, "restoring context" to the sources she delves into in an intelligent way. Her writing is energetic, evocative... She also has an unerring nose for what is interesting * Daily Telegraph *
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