And In The Absence Of Facts, Myth

A Rich, Multi-dimensional Tour Of Naples, Most Brilliant, Battered, And Bewildering Of Cities, Here Fixed To The Page With Wit And élan. Splendid.

I Checked To See If There’d Been A Really Good Book Published In The Last Few Decades. Then I Started With What Cleopatra Would Have Read, Asking Myself, “what Can We Know About Her Education?” It Turns Out To Be A Very Great Deal, And Bizarrely, No One Had Written About That Before.

It Has Always Been Preferable To Attribute A Woman's Success To Her Beauty Rather Than To Her Brains, To Reduce Her To The Sum Of Her Sex Life.

As Always, An Educated Woman Was A Dangerous Woman.

Cleopatra Stood At One Of The Most Dangerous Intersections In History; That Of Women And Power. Clever Women, Euripides Had Warned Hundreds Of Years Earlier, Were Dangerous.