Alexandria: speech and Spectator

by Peter Stothard

Yesterday morning I sat in a recording studio (a sometime underground prison cell) to hear myself played, with flattering fluency, by Kenneth Cranham for the forthcoming version of Alexandria: The Last Nights of Cleopatra on BBC Radio Four Book of the Week. In the afternoon I emerged into the sunlight to read another account of myself, moving but surprising too, in this week's Spectator. When I wrote a three-week diary at the onset of the Arab Spring  two-and-a-half years ago I never thought I would come out as so many different people.

The convention at the TLS is that the Editor's books are not reviewed in the paper. But this is the link to James McConnachie's Spectator piece.