Cleopatra and Steinbeck revisited

Is this really the only likeness of Cleopatra that can be historically verified?  Oh, dear.  I do believe Mary Beard (from whose blog I pinched this photo) but I am still disappointed.  So farewell Elizabeth Taylor and all of the other more nubile nymphets who portrayed this iconic figure from the Ancient World.  I need to rethink my previous assumptions and adjust the mental image I have of The Egyptian Queen.  Kathryn Hughes disappointed me further in today's Guardian by arguing persuasively that private letters are only an oblique, partial insight into a person's life (in discussing recently published letters of John Steinbeck).  I have a clear memory of writing on the value of private letters as a valid historical source at university but yet her arguments sweep aside my undergraduate analysis with a compelling counterblast. In essence we write letters, as all documents, with an audience in mind and so tailor our tone, our language and editorialise the content according to the effect we wish to produce, the impression we hope to create on the reader.  Letters are important, an essential building block in erecting a meaningful three-dimensional autobiographical structure, but they do not allow the degree of insight into the letter writer's mind (and life) that so many people, myself included, believe to be the case.  I agree, not at all reluctantly. Kathryn Hughes is clearly correct in her analysis.  But I was young, intellectually naive, and  I find this sort of historiographical revision refreshing.  I enjoy being challenged,  I enjoy being corrected.   How dull would it be to hold on to the same thoughts, the same ideas, the same opinions now as thirty years ago and not to expand by an iota one's knowledge and understanding of the world and all its wonders?  (Does that last sentence sound slightly Biblical?  I think it does.  Good ol' King James!)