Cleopatra
Product details
- ISBN 9780008781323
- Weight: 420g
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 26 Feb 2026
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
'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.
Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s books include the acclaimed biographies The Scapegoat: the Brilliant Brief Life of the Duke of Buckingham and The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, as well as the novel Peculiar Ground.
She has won the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Costa Biography of the Year Award, the Duff Cooper Prize, The Political Book Awards Biography of the Year Award, the BIO Plutarch Prize, the Randy Shilts Award for Non-Fiction, the Fawcett Prize, the Emily Toth Award and the Biographers’ Club Award for an Exceptional Contribution to Biography.
Cleopatra, now reissued with a revised conclusion, was her first book.
