Motherhood is always an act of courage.

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.

A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.

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.

Here you have an incredibly ambitious, accomplished woman who comes up against some of the same problems that women in power come up against today. Cleopatra plays an oddly pivotal role in world history as well; in her lifetime, Alexandria is the center of the universe, Rome is still a backwater.

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.

My next book is on the Salem witch trials. As a small-town Massachusetts girl, this makes me very happy. So does the reunion with documents!