Cleopatra: A Life

FROM : Guardian
PHOTO : www.guardian.co.uk

Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff

Miranda Seymour enjoys a dramatic biography of the last and most dazzling of the Ptolemys

How, wondered Pascal, could he best sum up the causes and effects – the bliss and then, the bondage – of love? He found the answer in a single word – a woman's name: Cleopatr

It's 20 years since a fine book by Lucy Hughes-Hallett undertook to disentangle the last and most resourceful of the Ptolemys from those myths which have masked her as an eastern whore (Boccaccio); a lustful sinner (Dante); an avaricious nymphomaniac (Cassius Dio); and – even further from the mark – a "silly little girl" (Shaw). Hughes-Hallett's work has now spawned a worthy successor. Ideally, as Stacy Schiff observes in her magnificent re-creation of both an extraordinary woman, and her times, our sense of Cleopatra would be heightened by her dramatic appearance as the doomed heroine of a sumptuous opera (Puccini, preferably).

MORE..........

Bookyards Editor: For more E-Books ,go here...