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" Classics isn't about the ancient world. It's partly about the ancient world, but it's about our conversation. It's how we try to talk to antiquity. "

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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. "

" Thinking through how you look to your enemies is helpful. That doesn't mean that your ideology is wrong and theirs is right, but maybe you have to recognise that they have one - and that it may be logically coherent. Which may be uncomfortable. "

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" There is nothing inherently conservative in the ancient world. "

" One person's barbarity is another person's civilisation. "

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

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" One of the great things about history is that it sort of isn't a done deal - ever. The historical texts and the historical evidence that you use is always somehow giving you different answers because you're asking it different questions. "

" The reason why the British theatrical tradition is world-leading in Greek drama is because there is a flourishing tradition of people rethinking Greek tragedy. "

" I loved 'Gladiator,' and I thought its depiction of gladiatorial combat, although it was an aggrandizing picture, was cleverly and expertly done. "

" I think, when I was 25, nobody in the world knew who I was. "

" You don't overturn x-thousand years of patriarchy in a generation. "

" People who exploit others come to spend an enormous amount of energy wondering about and justifying that exploitation. "

" There is no argument that I won't take seriously. "

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

" I was nearly struck by lightning on an excavation in Turkey. "

" Democracy requires information. Plato knew that informed decision-making requires knowledge. "

" If being a decent soul is being maternal, then fine. "

" I think most people gain some sense of how to look at a painting, but no one ever teaches you how to look at a piece of silver. "

" Barring some sociopaths, probably, there is nobody who doesn't care about their appearance. "

" Wherever possible, I try to see things from the other side of the dividing line and to read civilisation 'against the grain.' "

" 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.' "

" 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. "