When I was teaching at the University of Tehran we were struggling against the implementation of the revolution rules.

It is amazing how, when all possibilities seem to be taken away from you, the minutest opening can become a great freedom.

We speak of facts, yet facts exist only partially to us if they are not repeated and re-created through emotions, thoughts and feelings. To me it seemed as if we had not really existed, or only half existed, because we could not imaginatively realize ourselves and communicate to the world, because we had used works of imagination to serve as handmaidens to some political ploy.

There is little consolation in the fact that millions of people are unhappier than we are. Why should other people's misery make us happier or more content?

What dazzles us in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra are not the alluring mythologies about the evasive queen, but the astonishing if rare historical facts that Schiff has meticulously and lovingly excavated. Schiff offers not just Cleopatra's story but the story of an amazing era, one that has vanished but still affects us, questioning the way we look at myth, history, and ourselves.

I have a recurring fantasy that one more article has been added to the Bill of Rights: the right to free access to imagination.

I'm a perfectly equipped failure.