Mary Beard

“What politicians do is they never get the rhetoric wrong, and the price they pay is they don't speak the truth as they see it. Now, I will speak truth as I see it, and sometimes I don't get the rhetoric right. I think that's a fair trade-off.”

“I'm an academic. I argue; I engage with people.”

“I remember plastering the kitchen with Black Power pictures of Angela Davis.”

“Beard's secret is always to be slightly on the edge but to pull back from disaster at the last minute.”

“I was 11 when I started Latin - not like boys, who start early at prep school. At 14, you had to choose whether to start Greek and drop German, but my mum made a fuss, and I took Latin, Greek, French, and German at O-level, which meant I didn't do much science.”

“The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really.”

“I'm not in the slightest wanting to attack the women's movement here. But I think that in popular, broadly left-wing, broadly feminist discourse, there is a tendency to just label discrimination against women - and embedded assumptions about them - as misogyny and think 'job done.'”

“For whatever reason, some sorts of women's silence were broken by MeToo. This is the optimistic bit. And that will lead to a much more careful attention to women's voices.”

“Nobody but an idiot would pretend that they had an error-proof way of choosing the 'best' out of hundreds of perfectly qualified applicants - not for university or for anything.”

“If you say to a group of women professors, 'Close your eyes and think of a professor,' what they will see is a guy. I will. And I'll stop myself and think, 'Hey, hang on, what am I doing here?'”

“You can hardly be a classicist and not be interested in theatre.”

“I think that what will help women get into positions of power - well, day nurseries, equal pay, family-friendly working hours. And I think all that's important. I used to think it was the solution. I now think it's enabling, and it's important, but still we have got head work to do about this.”

“I'd quite like to be in Caligula's court - living in the back room somewhere and just being able to observe.”

“I have lots of heroes and heroines, mostly unsung and including my husband.”

“There is nothing inherently conservative in the ancient world.”

“There's plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.”

“When I am making a TV show, I am looking for engagement, not admiration.”

“The building blocks of discrimination tend to be similar wherever you find them.”

“You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.”

“I think you have to realize that most ancient warfare is really kind of hit and run, honestly. You go and you bash down the walls of some enemy 50 miles away and you take some slaves, you take some cattle, probably a bit of cash too, and then you say goodbye and go home and you probably do the same thing next year - or try to, or they do it to you.”