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" My day job is working on Roman history and ancient Roman history. "

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

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

" One of the downsides of working in antiquity is that you don't have many female voices, but you certainly have a lot of male terror about the potential of women's power. It shows you very clearly that the most oppressive cultures tend to be afraid of those whom they oppress. "

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

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

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

" If women are not perceived to be fully within the structures of power, surely it is power that we need to redefine rather than women? "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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.' "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

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

" I used to think that the British press were particularly awful to Cherie Blair. I think Blair's foreign policy was a complete disaster, but the British press, when they wanted to explain why Blair took unexpected moves, they did create Cherie as the power behind the throne. "

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

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

" 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?' "

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

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

" 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. "

" We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence. "

" Nobody but an idiot would pretend that they had an error-proof way of choosing the 'best' out of hundreds of perfectly qualified applicants - not for university or for anything. "

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

" 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. "

" What I find very interesting is, we're not enthralled by the ancient world, and we've escaped all kinds of ancient preconceptions and assumptions and prejudices. But, nevertheless, we still make that connection between authoritative speech and male speech. "

" I've chosen to be this way because that's how I feel comfortable with myself. That's how I am. It's about joining up the dots between how you look and how you feel inside, and I think that's what I've done, and I think people do it differently. "