Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Cambridge and a fellow of Newnham College. She is the author of SPQR, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town and Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling and Cracking Up. Her LRB Winter Lectures on ‘Women in Power’ and ‘The Public Voice of Women’ were published as a book in 2018.
Mary Beard delivers her 2014 LRB Winter Lecture on ‘The Public Voice of Women’.
From Medusa to Merkel, Mary Beard considers the extent to which the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded.
Ahead of her LRB Winter Lecture at the British Museum, we talk to Mary Beard about women in power. Why are powerful women so often called phonies? What can we learn about women and power from the ancient...
Mary Beard talks to Sarah Churchwell about her book Women & Power, which looks at how history has treated powerful women.
The life of a first-century Roman emperor seems typically to have been a sorry business. The vast polity looked to a single authority for stability; but for those who either pushed themselves or were pushed...
Neil Tennant described his run of hits between ‘It’s a Sin’ and ‘Heart’ as the Pet Shop Boys’ imperial phase, when they owned the charts and charmed the...
The oldest joke I know, the oldest joke that a real person quite probably told on a quite probably actual occasion, is one ascribed to Sophocles. Ion of Chios, a lesser poet, claimed he...
The triumph is a key element of the modern image of the Romans, embodying the characteristics we love to imagine as quintessentially Roman: militarism, arrogance, cruelty, spectacle. Because the...
In Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, a group of clever, fastidious preppies in a small liberal arts college on the East Coast reinvent the cult of Dionysus. They brew a concoction of...
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