84 Quotes by Bettany Hughes

We've lived in our Victorian house for 20 years and the kitchen is the centre of family life - we don't just eat here, we live here.

Cricket's in the blood - my dad loves it and my brother Simon played for Middlesex before becoming a radio and TV cricket commentator.

By day I am a historian, by night a broadcaster.

As soon as men began to write, they made Helen of Troy their subject; for close on three thousand years she has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield... But who was she?

You're a good presenter if you know your subject and you can communicate it with passion. Period. That's all that matters on telly.

When she stepped out of that spumy sea Aphrodite was said to have brought fertility, flowers, life, light to a barren world. For centuries women and men went to her sanctuaries to seek her pity and protection. Her domain was originally not just lust, but lust for life.

Venus's life story across 5,000 years reminds us not to trivialise the power of desire: the ancients were right to never underestimate its influence.

Aphrodite-Venus had become not a subject of adoration, but an agent of exploitation. From the moment Christian society perceived sex not as a gift of the goddess but a crime against God himself, women were believed to be the vessels of love's malign power.

The presence of industrial quantities of Byzantine pottery dating from the sixth century AD on the headland at Tintagel, Chinese silk in the tombs around Mecca and 'Arabic' numerals in the 13th-century beams of Salisbury Cathedral tell us we have been interdependent not for decades but across millennia.