This is the best book I've read on Cleopatra in the last year. Yes, there was one other (Diana Preston's Antony and Cleopatra -- which was also quite good, with more of a focus on Roman history). It was smooth and enjoyable reading from beginning to end, despite or perhaps because it was often egregiously overwritten. The biggest problem is that we have very little contemporaneous evidence about Cleopatra's life and the stories we do have generally date from centuries later, refracted through a prism of a victor's bias. Schiff is undeterred by this, which makes the book as much historical novel as biography. Which is fine -- we can't do much better -- just a bit at odds with the claim that the book cuts through two thousand years of accumulated myths.