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" 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. "

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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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" In real life, Oxford and Cambridge are two excellent universities, like many others in the country. They are full of highly intelligent, hard-working, and quite ordinary students and teachers. "

" There's plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" There is no way, absolutely no way, that I would want people to stop reading the 'Odyssey.' But I want them to read it with their eyes open. To notice it and then to think what it says about us. "

" When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice. "

" We make two mistakes about the ancient world. One is to assume they were better than us - that, for instance, the ancient Olympics didn't involve money-making. The opposite mistake, and just as common, is to think our Olympics are much more civilised than ancient sporting competitions. Neither is true. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

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

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

" The web is democratising and also the voice of people who don't think they have another outlet. And that voice can be punitive. "

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

" 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. "

" The history of art is not just the history of artists; it is also the history of the people who viewed art. And that wider perspective can help us see some of the reasons why the art of the ancient world should still matter to us. "

" If you ask me what is civilisation, it's little more than an act of faith. "

" It would have been nice if the people who were criticising 'Civilizations' had actually watched it. But the popular response has been tremendous, and in the end, that's what really matters. "

" I do not think that the lives of women of my generation, as a class, were blighted by the way the power differentials between men and women operated. We wanted to change those power differentials; we also had a good time. "

" I would summarise my politics very simply as the maverick left and proud. "