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

" I think that what will help women get into positions of power - well, day nurseries, equal pay, family-friendly working hours. And I think all that's important. I used to think it was the solution. I now think it's enabling, and it's important, but still we have got head work to do about this. "

" It's great fun being an academic because you have a certain licence to be a bit of a joker. "

" I knew that Trump was ghastly. I knew I'd vote for Hillary if I had a vote. "

" You have to do what you feel comfortable with. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" I receive something we might euphemistically call an 'inappropriately hostile' response - that is to say, more than fair criticism or even fair anger - every time I speak on radio or television. "

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

" No women in ancient Rome ever had the vote. "

" There's a basic rule of thumb that the more a culture oppresses women, or oppresses anyone, the more culturally preoccupied they are with that. "

" I'm very interested in how people in the 19th century travelled to Greece. "

" 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. "

" History is how we have learnt to think about ourselves. It's not as though the Greeks and Romans are static entities out there to be discovered and translated. We make them speak, we talk to them, and they inform what we say. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" A lot of sexism is just very silly... and the best response is laughter and ridicule. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" I was not much good as a waitress. "

" The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really. "

" Fate has it in for me to be an exhibit: that funny old lady from the telly. "

" However judicious academics may be - not like me - they are all taught to see through crap. "

" 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. "

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

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

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