Stacy Schiff
Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.Collection: Ancient
No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up,'Collection: Growing Up
The vanity extended most of all to his library, arguably the real love of Cicero's life. It is difficult to name anything in which he took more pleasure, aside possibly evasion of the sumptuary laws. Cicero liked to believe himself wealthy. He prided himself on his books. He needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts.Collection: Real
Motherhood is always an act of courage.Collection: Motherhood
Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.Collection: Long
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.Collection: Clever
A rich, multi-dimensional tour of Naples, most brilliant, battered, and bewildering of cities, here fixed to the page with wit and élan. Splendid.Collection: Cities