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“... by ideas of purity and danger, ancient matriarchal powers and the anger of the vengeful dead. Mary Beard is suspicious of such over-simplifications, however. Hers is an anti-biography, which confronts previous versions of Harrison’s life: Sandra Peacock’s hagiography of 1988, which read the work as determined by personal feeling, and the more ...”

“... Neal Ascherson, Mary Beard, Jonathan Coe, Tom Crewe, William Davies, Sionaidh Douglas-Scott, Lorna Finlayson, Daniel Finn, Katrina Forrester, Jeremy Harding, Daisy Hildyard, Colin Kidd, James Meek, Ferdinand Mount, Jan-Werner Müller, Jonathan Parry, David RuncimanNeal Ascherson‘On​ 17 June poor France fell ...”

“... Vitellius and Domitian, have offered endless amusement to readers never likely to be so tempted. Mary Beard tells us that in later centuries, The Twelve Caesars (as Suetonius’ book was often called) did more than any other text to kindle interest in Roman emperors, especially after printed editions began to appear in 1470. ...”

“... have been quick to register their disapproval. Some historians have compared RMF to Islamic State. Mary Beard warned that to remove the statue would be to erase history. One of the RMF organisers, the South African Rhodes scholar Ntokozo Qwabe, has been attacked in the press for the ‘hypocrisy’ of criticising Rhodes while being a beneficiary of his ...”

“... his house with his wife, sister and long dead mother to sit down and watch the show. Reading Mary Beard’s The Roman Triumph, however, makes you realise that the inherited professional wisdom isn’t much more accurate than the TV version, because our supposedly informed view of what a triumph was really like turns out to be a bricolage of scraps ...”

“... charts and charmed the critics by setting Che Guevara and Debussy to a disco beat. We are now in Mary Beard’s imperial phase, and she’s entered it with wit and charm and insight rather than the intellectual thuggery of Niall Ferguson. After A Don’s Life blog and its printed spin-offs, after the misogyny she faced for daring to present a BBC2 ...”

“... the Greeks are remembered as genial as well as clever. Roman laughter, which is the subject of Mary Beard’s book, Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling and Cracking Up, is a much less obvious topic of study. The​ first few pages do nothing to dispel our misgivings. She begins in autumn 192 AD, when the emperor Commodus, megalomaniac son of ...”

“... Martin’s card about with me in my pocket like a hand warmer.24 July. A piece in the TLS in which Mary Beard rereads and reassesses Fergus Millar’s The Emperor in the Roman World (1977). A stocky heavy-headed young man, I used to see him at Oxford seemingly always on his way back from squash. I knew at the time he was formidably clever and from a ...”

“... questioning and bullying. It was reminiscent of the post 9/11 mood in this country (remember Mary Beard?), leave alone the States. And what of the huge Sunday crowd convened by the president at the place de la République? The photo-op brigade at the front turned into a disaster when Netanyahu, waving triumphantly to onlookers, crashed his way to ...”

“... on the World Trade Center was the often repeated slogan that it was a ‘cowardly’ attack. Mary Beard Cambridge It has been hard in the past twenty years for Americans to think about the United States and the world; and it is going to be harder now. Yet the terrible events of 11 September have alarmed us into reflection. Terrorism, religious ...”

“... of their trusteeships if they endorse the ‘decolonisation’ of their institutions. When Mary Beard was put forward as a trustee of the British Museum, the government rejected her on the grounds that she was pro-EU (the museum appointed her anyway).Another example of the government’s willingness to weaponise the past is Life in the United ...”

“... conflagration ensues, and a monarchy rises from the ashes of the Republic. It was an age, as Mary Beard says in her introduction, of ‘political murder, street violence, constant warfare both inside and outside Rome, and fundamental disagreements about how the state should be run, how democracy and liberty might be preserved, while the demands of ...”

“... that persisted throughout antiquity. ‘I have never come across Marcus Sidonius Falx before,’ Mary Beard comments in her foreword, ‘but I know his type.’ Toner nicely captures the moral ambivalence of the master-slave relationship. On the one hand, Marcus’ attitude is unabashedly exploitative: slaves exist to enrich the household, so the aim ...”

“... the kind of environment from which they arose. For a start, as White shows, building on work by Mary Beard, these 900 letters are not the flotsam of chance survival they seem to be. Someone has edited and organised the collections that have survived, and that someone, according to White’s compelling argument, had a definite plan in mind when he set ...”

“... Cemetery. Search for ‘Oliver Rawlings’ and the first thing you will see is an account of Mary Beard retweeting his comment, ‘You filthy old slut. I bet your vagina is disgusting.’ He received so much abuse that Beard ended up writing him a character reference. ‘He is going to find it hard to get a ...”