Dame Mary Beard on Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old

'The rock star scholar of Ancient Rome' FINANCIAL TIMES

'The reigning Queen of Classics' SPECTATOR

The world's most acclaimed classicist explains why the Classics still matter.

Dame Mary Beard is one of our country's most famous historians. She is the Professor Emerita of Classics at Cambridge and is the Classics editor of the TLS. She is also the co-host, with Charlotte Higgins, of the podcast Instant Classics.

Her previous books include the bestselling, Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii as well as Confronting the Classics, SPQR, Women & Power and Emperor of Rome.

What's exciting about a piece of bread 4,000 years old? Or some pots of paint abandoned in the eruption at Pompeii? Why should we be bothered with the distant past anyway? What's the point?

The life, art and literature of ancient Greece and Rome have something to offer everyone. They are not the property of wealthy white men only. They make us wonder how to make sense of people who lived long ago (from angry landlords to giggling senators) - and to think harder about our own world, to look at it differently.

In Talking Classics, Mary Beard points to the surprising connections between antiquity and the present. From revolutionaries to dictators, Bob Dylan to Beyonce, she joins forces with the varied modern characters who have been transfixed by the ancient world. It's not compulsory, she argues, to be excited by antiquity, but it's a shame not to be.

Filling the book with lively stories, curious facts and some good gossip, Talking Classics explains why the deep past does really affect us all.