Phillips was an incredible showman. He could talk his way into anything, and he had no qualms about speaking to kings, sultans, or shaykhs. He was the Kalendar Prince writ large...

In the late 1940s, an adventurer named Wendell Philips organized a series of archaeological expeditions to find traces of Ali Baba and Sinbad. He became both famous and rich; admirers called him "the American Lawrence of Arabia.”

If there were a musical score to the Petrie and Pettigrew series, it would be a tango. That mysterious dance, at once sexually alluring and classically elegant, runs through the series, driven by themes of lost love, broken hearts, and loss of innocence.

The Student differs from the other works because it was written like a stream-of-consciousness memoir rather than a structured novel. It is a memory—often uncertain, sometimes chaotic recollections of events that occurred decades before…

"You're late, as usual," the instructor said, as she thumped a worn leather binder in front of me. "Let's see what you can do with this."

“Alf Layla wa-Layla.” I didn't need a dictionary to read the words: A Thousand and One Nights. I leaned back in my chair and wondered, The Arabian Nights are sitting open before me, and they are real.

Scheherazade couldn't have made all those stories up; she had to get them from somewhere. The stories themselves come from a variety of sources: Arabic, Persian, and even ancient myths. So not only was she beautiful, but also extraordinarily literate for her time.

I first heard Rimsky Korsakov's Scheherazade on scratchy 78 RPM records. When the solo violin started Scheherazade's soaring theme, I leaned close to the old record player and was transported to a world of dashing heroes, beautiful princesses, and evil villains. Nothing Hollywood could produce came close to the imaginary wonders of the Arabian Nights…

When I first started out, I read the "little book" by Strunk and White. Their mantra was: "Keep it short, stupid." So I wrote neat little sentences. Didn't work…

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn't just pop up one morning and write The Speckled Band; he wrote thousands of other words that nobody remembers today. And that's pretty much true of all the great writers: The stuff we read is really just the tip of iceberg. So start writing.

There is a joke that goes: "They laughed when I sat down to write." That was me. Then I decided to write a book…

The great queen lives in our imaginations. You can like her, you can hate her, but you cannot turn your eyes away from her…

So what did Cleopatra actually look like? The current generation thinks she looked like either Elizabeth Taylor or Adele James. Earlier generations favored Claudette Colbert, Theda Bara, or Sarah Bernhardt. But are any of those depictions really true? Probably not…

Cleopatra: the very name evokes imagery. Her full name was Cleopatra VII Thea Philopater. Cleopatra means “glory of the father” or “father-loving goddess,” depending on the translation…