Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town

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Mary Beard will be in conversation with Charlotte Higgins at a Guardian Live event at the Shaw Theatre in London on Friday 16 March. Details: theguardian.com/guardianlive

Mary Beard: ‘The last thing I’d want is a world in which we Mary Beard: ‘The last thing I’d want is a world in which we

Classicist Mary Beard on Feminism, Online Trolls and What Ancient Rome Can Tell Us About Trump". Time.com. 4 September 2018 . Retrieved 7 December 2021. With unparalleled access to Pompeii and featuring cutting-edge modern technology, Mary Beard guides us through this amazing slice of the ancient world.On 14 February 2014, Beard delivered a lecture on the public voice of women at the British Museum as part of the London Review of Books winter lecture series. It was recorded and broadcast on BBC Four a month later under the title Oh Do Shut Up, Dear!. [24] The lecture begins with the example of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope, admonishing his mother to retreat to her chamber. [25] (The title alludes to Prime Minister David Cameron telling a female MP to "Calm down, dear!", which earned wide-spread criticism as a "classic sexist put-down". [26] [27] [28]) Three years later, Beard gave a second lecture for the same partners, entitled "Women in Power: from Medusa to Merkel". It considered the extent to which the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded, and how idioms from ancient Greece are still used to normalise gendered violence. [29] She argues that "we don’t have a model or a template for what a powerful woman looks like. We only have templates that make them men." [30] Mary Beard interview: 'I hadn't realised that there were people like". The Independent. 15 March 2013 . Retrieved 9 June 2018. Greece in 'preliminary' talks with British Museum about Parthenon marbles". The Guardian. 3 December 2022 . Retrieved 4 December 2022– via www.theguardian.com. HowTheTricolorGotItsStripes is a highly entertaining and likeable history of flags by Ukrainian ex-cabinet Minister Dmytro Dubilet and was originally published in Ukrainian 🇺🇦

The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found - Goodreads The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found - Goodreads

There’s a recent vogue for retelling the stories of the sidelined women of classical history and literature. Does reimagining their lives help or hinder our understanding of the period? Where does Emperor of Rome stand in relation to your previous books – I’m thinking of SPQR and Twelve Caesars ?Bizarrely, yes! It surprises me. It’s really great to be able to physically demonstrate that you can be my age and make a telly programme on the basis of what you know. That’s hugely important because it’s still something that’s quite difficult for a woman of 18 to think is possible. There’s still a long way to go – equal pay would be a start – but there has been a change. The Sather Professor". University of California, Berkeley Department of Classics. Archived from the original on 10 August 2012 . Retrieved 16 July 2008. Beard describes herself as academically “flighty”. Instead of burrowing into one small area – a single Latin author, for example, or Roman religion in a given period – she has darted between topics; and, perhaps because of her gregarious nature, has preferred those topics not to be especially obscure. She turned to the Vestal Virgins, she told me, because she realised that state religion in the Roman republic “wasn’t much of an opener at a party”. After The Good Working Mother’s Guide, her next sole-authored book was a biography of one of her foremothers at Newnham, the early 20th-century classicist Jane Harrison. She has written about the Romans’ sense of humour, the Triumph (a ritual victory parade undertaken by Roman generals), and the Parthenon. Her next, more academic, book, after a TV tie-in for Civilisations, is another departure – about images of the Caesars in art since the Renaissance. Sometimes, she overcompensated for her femininity. After her first baby, she decided to continue with her duties as secretary of the Cambridge Philological Society, a fortnightly faculty club where papers were presented. Her job was to read out the minutes from the last session. “I thought: I’m bloody well not going to let them say I had ratted on that obligation. Four or five days after Zoe was born, I went and read the minutes, and after a few minutes of the paper I slipped away.” For the rest of the term, she did the same: read the minutes, and discreetly slipped away to feed the baby, feeling utterly heroic. But heroism, it transpired, was not what the blokes saw. They saw a shirker. A decade later, she was in the pub with a colleague. “And he said: ‘Oh yes, you were the one who used to turn up, and then not hear the paper.’” Beard recalled: “My breasts were exploding.”