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.

parenting is an exercise in unintended consequences.

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

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

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.

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

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

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 first seems sometimes even to undermine the second.

Motherhood is always an act of courage.

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!

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

Embrace all. Help some. Trust few. Harm none.

I can hear the tick tick tick in my head: A tripwire ready to explode in fury. And then, in my mind, I start to count down from ten…any moment now.

We're all traitors now.” “Ha!” the old lady said. “Only if we lose.

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

I really don't see myself in the Europa League and don't want to play in it. I couldn't care less about winning the trophy.

I always had a fascination with twins.

That's why their realization is not integrated and complete, and they must go through many, many lifetimes very often before that acceptance will take place.

Want of occupation is the bane of both men and women, perhaps more especially of the latter.

I had to read Wuthering Heights for English and I never enjoyed a book in all my life as much as that one.

What have we here? a man or a fish? dead or alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient and fishlike smell; a kind of not of the newest poor-John. A strange fish!