In Alexandria, Cleopatra watched the second duel—that between Mark Antony and Caesar's murderers. She helped neither party, and when Antony won he summoned her... She came, not in a carpet but in a gilded barge, and her life henceforward belongs less to history than to poetry... Voluptuous but watchful, she treated her new lover as she had treated her old. She never bored him, and since grossness means monotony she sharpened his mind to those more delicate delights, where sense verges into spirit. Her infinite variety lay in that. She was the last of a secluded and subtle race, she was a flower that Alexandria had taken three hundred years to produce and that eternity cannot wither. Widely regarded as "the best guidebook ever written" E.M. Forster's ALEXANDRIA remains one of his most rare and least explored works – an evocative, informative exploration of that most fabled, exotic and elusive of cities. Perhaps the world's first truly cosmopolitan city, Alexandria remains enigmatic, enduring and forever intriguing. Forster's ALEXANDRIA is, as Lawrence Durrell noted, a labor of love.