Women enjoyed rights in Egypt they would not again enjoy for more than 2,000 years. They owned ships, ran vineyards, filed lawsuits, practiced medici….

I'm a sucker for lost worlds. I was nostalgic even as a child. I was happiest in my hometown library in Adams, Mass., where nothing seemed to change..

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history..

No one sits on the stoop when she's a kid and thinks, 'I want to be a biographer when I grow up,'.

Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections in history; that of women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned hundreds of years ….

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences..

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!.

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

Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens..

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 mys….

Motherhood is always an act of courage..

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 stra….

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. C….

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

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 pleas….

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman..

We don't know how Cleopatra spent her days, but we do know how other Hellenistic monarchs spent their days. There has been a great amount of scholars….

Strangely enough, politics may just be the one realm in which having kids imposes no penalty on women. Kids are practically a necessity. For scientis….

No one in the modern world controls the wealth or territory that Cleopatra did..

An interesting thing about book groups, it seems to me, is that there is no correlation between a brilliant book and a brilliant discussion. The firs….

For a few thousand years, women had no history. Marriage was our calling, and meekness our virtue. Over the last century, in stuttering succession, w….