Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Action without study is fatal.
I was not much good as a waitress.
I have always hated fancy dress parties.
No women in ancient Rome ever had the vote.
You always regret upsetting people needlessly.
You can't always worry about offending people.
I'm an academic. I argue; I engage with people.
If being a decent soul is being maternal, then fine.
One person's barbarity is another person's civilisation.
I was nearly struck by lightning on an excavation in Turkey.
There is nothing inherently conservative in the ancient world.
You can hardly be a classicist and not be interested in theatre.
My day job is working on Roman history and ancient Roman history.
You don't overturn x-thousand years of patriarchy in a generation.
Grey is my hair colour. I really can't see why I should change it.
There's plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.
When I am making a TV show, I am looking for engagement, not admiration.
If being a decent soul is being maternal, then fine. I'll call it human.
I would summarise my politics very simply as the maverick left and proud.
We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence.
If you ask me what is civilisation, it's little more than an act of faith.
I'm very interested in how people in the 19th century travelled to Greece.
I have lots of heroes and heroines, mostly unsung and including my husband.
Fate has it in for me to be an exhibit: that funny old lady from the telly.
I knew that Trump was ghastly. I knew I'd vote for Hillary if I had a vote.
I remember plastering the kitchen with Black Power pictures of Angela Davis.
The building blocks of discrimination tend to be similar wherever you find them.
A lot of sexism is just very silly... and the best response is laughter and ridicule.
The gloomiest way of describing the ancient world is it is misogyny from A to Z, really.
When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.
It wasn't until I got to Cambridge that I discovered active discrimination against women.
It's great fun being an academic because you have a certain licence to be a bit of a joker.
Barring some sociopaths, probably, there is nobody who doesn't care about their appearance.
However judicious academics may be - not like me - they are all taught to see through crap.
Democracy requires information. Plato knew that informed decision-making requires knowledge.
I have always thought the women's movement traded too much on outrage and not enough on ridicule.
Beard's secret is always to be slightly on the edge but to pull back from disaster at the last minute.
Playing around with other people's husbands when you were 17 was bad news. Yes, I was a very naughty girl.
Fame is fickle. If the media turn against me, I will just have more time in the library. Not bad as a fate.
I'd quite like to be in Caligula's court - living in the back room somewhere and just being able to observe.
I don't want to see a world in which women can communicate on Twitter, but their actual voices are not heard.
You cannot easily fit women into a structure that is already coded as male; you have to change the structure.
I was really good at Latin at school, and because I was good at it, I got more interested and got better at it.
Roman military tactics were much over-rated. All the clever ones had the same idea, which was to go round the back.
People who exploit others come to spend an enormous amount of energy wondering about and justifying that exploitation.
Gender is a key marker of power and powerlessness. Most of the structures of how our world works are biased in terms of men.
Wherever possible, I try to see things from the other side of the dividing line and to read civilisation 'against the grain.'
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.
The web is democratising and also the voice of people who don't think they have another outlet. And that voice can be punitive.
The thing about being a university teacher is that you're fairly tolerant about young people saying things they shouldn't have said.