The world-renowned author of The Autobiography of Henry VIII and Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles turns from Renaissance Britain to ancient Egypt and the story of Cleopatra, Queen of the Nile. Told in the first person - from the young queen's earliest memories of her father's tenuous rule to her own reign over one of the most glittering kingdoms in the world - this is a mesmerizing saga of ambition and power.But it is also a tale of passion that begins when the twenty-one-year-old Cleopatra, desperate to return from exile, seeks out the one man who can help her, the Roman general Julius Caesar - and does not end until, having survived the assassination of Caesar and the defeat of the second man she loves, Marc Antony, she plots her own death rather than allow herself to be paraded in triumph through the streets of Rome. Read Less