In his clear preface, Gilbert Murray says with truth that The Trojan Women, valued by the usage of the stage, is not a perfect play. It is only the crying of one of the great wrongs of the world wrought into music. Yet it is one of the greater dramas of the elder world. In one situation, with little movement, with few figures, it flashes out a great dramatic lesson, the infinite pathos of a successful wrong. It has in it the very soul of the tragic....

From one of Britain's best-known observers of the monarchy-an intimate portrait of Queen Elizabeth II, England's longest-reigning queen, in celebration of her Diamond Jubilee     History has known no monarch like her. She has traveled farther than all her predecessors put together and lived longer than any of them. She has known more historic figures than anyone alive-from Churchill to Mandela, de Gaulle to Obama.   Now, the distinguished royal...

"The remarkable, little-known story of two trailblazing women in the Early Middle Ages who wielded immense power, only to be vilified for daring to rule. Brunhild was a foreign princess, raised to be married off for the sake of alliance-building. Her sister-in-law Fredegund started out as a lowly palace slave. And yet-in sixth-century Merovingian France, where women were excluded from noble succession and royal politics was a blood sport-these two...

Hatshepsut - the daughter of a general who usurped Egypt's throne - was born into a privileged position in the royal household, and she was expected to bear the sons who would legitimize the reign of her father's family. Her failure to produce a male heir was ultimately the twist of fate that paved the way for her improbable rule as a cross-dressing king. At just over twenty, Hatshepsut ascended to the rank of pharaoh in an elaborate coronation ceremony...