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" At 16, I got into local-education archaeology classes - you got to go to summer digs. It allowed me to be both intellectual and a bad girl with a wicked social life every evening! "
Mary Beard
Evening
Girl
Life
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" I was really good at Latin at school, and because I was good at it, I got more interested and got better at it. "
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" 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. "
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" Gender is a key marker of power and powerlessness. Most of the structures of how our world works are biased in terms of men. "
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" I have lots of heroes and heroines, mostly unsung and including my husband. "
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" It wasn't until I got to Cambridge that I discovered active discrimination against women. "
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" We lived in the schoolhouse of the village school in Church Preen, in deepest Shropshire, and my mum was the schoolmistress. She taught the juniors, and one other teacher taught the infants. I went there from the age of three, no doubt as a form of childcare. "
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" I would summarise my politics very simply as the maverick left and proud. "
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" In general, I never think it is a good idea to try to recreate past successes. You have to strike out on your own, for better or worse. "
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" 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. "
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" I was not much good as a waitress. "
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" I was into Black Power, and my practice Oxbridge essay was a rant. The headmistress said I'd never get in with that, but she was probably wrong. I was the ideal combination: a swot who was also a bad girl. "
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" A lot of sexism is just very silly... and the best response is laughter and ridicule. "
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" Beard's secret is always to be slightly on the edge but to pull back from disaster at the last minute. "
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" If talking about arts means being pretentious, a bit like being a wine critic, then I don't feel comfy with that. You can get a lot from paintings without getting mystical about brush strokes. "
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" The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really. "
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" One of its most powerful weapons has always been 'barbarity': 'we' know that 'we' are civilised by contrasting ourselves with those we deem to be un-civilised, with those who do not - or cannot be trusted to - share our values. "
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" Barring some sociopaths, probably, there is nobody who doesn't care about their appearance. "
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" What interests me is the idea that classics is actually quite democratic. It isn't only the toff, upper-class subject it's often thought to be. Every generation enjoys rediscovering it. "
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" When I am making a TV show, I am looking for engagement, not admiration. "
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" My day job is working on Roman history and ancient Roman history. "
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" 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?' "
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" I loved 'Gladiator,' and I thought its depiction of gladiatorial combat, although it was an aggrandizing picture, was cleverly and expertly done. "
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" I'm exploring the long history of women, first of all, being silenced and, secondly, not being taken seriously in the political and public sphere. It's a call to action through understanding and through looking at ourselves again and trying to reformulate the whole question of women and power. "
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" In 1984, I returned to Newnham College at Cambridge University to teach after completing my Ph.D. there a couple of years earlier. Almost all of my colleagues in the university's classics department were men, and my office at the all-women's college was in the dorm. "
Mary Beard
Office
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Colleagues