Mary Beard is a classicist who has been associated with Newnham College, Cambridge on and off for the last fifty years. She is the author of SPQR, Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town and Laughter in Ancient Rome: On Joking, Tickling and Cracking Up. Her LRB Winter Lectures on ‘Women in Power’ and ‘The Public Voice of Women’ were published as a book in 2018. Her most recent book is Emperor of Rome.
Most of the Cambridge institutions we now take for granted (from not walking on the grass to the two-part Tripos and May Balls) were invented by these grey, smug, ‘hen-pecked’ late-19th-century types, all tucked up in bed by 10 p.m.
When René Goscinny, the creator of Astérix, died in 1977, it was, in the words of one French obituary, ‘as if the Eiffel Tower had fallen down’. The cartoon adventures of the plucky little Gaul holding out against Roman conquest (with the help of a magic potion that could confer a few minutes’ irresistible strength at a single gulp) were as much a defining part of...
Marcus Tullius Cicero was murdered on 7 December 43 BC: Rome’s most famous orator, off-and-on defender of Republican liberty and thundering critic of autocracy. He was finally hunted down by lackeys of Mark Antony, a member of Rome’s ruling junta and principal victim of Cicero’s dazzling swansong of invective: more than a dozen speeches called the Philippics, after...
At Christmas 1859, one of the 19th century’s most celebrated headmasters suddenly, and for no obvious reason, resigned his job. The Rev. Charles Vaughan had taken charge at Harrow in 1845, when the school was close to collapse. There were just 69 boys on the roll (many of whom were seriously in debt to the local loan shark); even by Victorian standards the boys’ lodgings were a...
Mary Beard delivers her 2014 LRB Winter Lecture on ‘The Public Voice of Women’.
From Medusa to Merkel, Mary Beard considers the extent to which the exclusion of women from power is culturally embedded.
Ahead of her LRB Winter Lecture at the British Museum, we talk to Mary Beard about women in power. Why are powerful women so often called phonies? What can we learn about women and power from the ancient...
Mary Beard talks to Sarah Churchwell about her book Women & Power, which looks at how history has treated powerful women.
The life of a first-century Roman emperor seems typically to have been a sorry business. The vast polity looked to a single authority for stability; but for those who either pushed themselves or were pushed...
Neil Tennant described his run of hits between ‘It’s a Sin’ and ‘Heart’ as the Pet Shop Boys’ imperial phase, when they owned the charts and charmed the...
The oldest joke I know, the oldest joke that a real person quite probably told on a quite probably actual occasion, is one ascribed to Sophocles. Ion of Chios, a lesser poet, claimed he...
The triumph is a key element of the modern image of the Romans, embodying the characteristics we love to imagine as quintessentially Roman: militarism, arrogance, cruelty, spectacle. Because the...
In Donna Tartt’s novel The Secret History, a group of clever, fastidious preppies in a small liberal arts college on the East Coast reinvent the cult of Dionysus. They brew a concoction of...
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