Mary Beard

No women in ancient Rome ever had the vote.

I was really good at Latin at school, and because I was good at it, I got more interested and got better at it.

My mother took me to the British Museum aged five. I had thought people from the past weren't as good as we were, and then I saw the Elgin marbles. Suddenly, the world seemed more complicated.

I'm actually in a tradition of classicists with a big public face who like sounding off.

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

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

It wasn't until I got to Cambridge that I discovered active discrimination against women.

Playing around with other people's husbands when you were 17 was bad news. Yes, I was a very naughty girl.

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

English country towns are often seen as a cultural wasteland, but the more cut off you are, the more the need to create things, to make your own culture.

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

I don't want to see a world in which women can communicate on Twitter, but their actual voices are not heard.

I have always thought the women's movement traded too much on outrage and not enough on ridicule.

Whatever you say about popular culture, people like people who know things, who are experts, and it doesn't particularly matter what they look like.

What is the role of an academic - no matter what they're teaching - within political debate? It has to be that they make issues more complicated. The role of the academic is to make everything less simple.

The thing about being a university teacher is that you're fairly tolerant about young people saying things they shouldn't have said.

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.'

All religions throughout history have been concerned about - and have sometimes fought over - what it means to represent God, and they have found elegant, intriguing, and awkward ways to confront that dilemma.

Roman military tactics were much over-rated. All the clever ones had the same idea, which was to go round the back.

Gender is a key marker of power and powerlessness. Most of the structures of how our world works are biased in terms of men.