187 Quotes by Mary Beard

Playing around with other people's husbands when you were 17 was bad news. Yes, I was a very naughty girl.

I'm very interested in how people in the 19th century travelled to Greece.

I was 11 when I started Latin - not like boys, who start early at prep school. At 14, you had to choose whether to start Greek and drop German, but my mum made a fuss, and I took Latin, Greek, French, and German at O-level, which meant I didn't do much science.

The thing about being a university teacher is that you're fairly tolerant about young people saying things they shouldn't have said.

At 16, I got into local-education archaeology classes - you got to go to summer digs. It allowed me to be both intellectual and a bad girl with a wicked social life every evening!

What is the role of an academic - no matter what they're teaching - within political debate? It has to be that they make issues more complicated. The role of the academic is to make everything less simple.

I was into Black Power, and my practice Oxbridge essay was a rant. The headmistress said I'd never get in with that, but she was probably wrong. I was the ideal combination: a swot who was also a bad girl.

We lived in the schoolhouse of the village school in Church Preen, in deepest Shropshire, and my mum was the schoolmistress. She taught the juniors, and one other teacher taught the infants. I went there from the age of three, no doubt as a form of childcare.

Whatever you say about popular culture, people like people who know things, who are experts, and it doesn't particularly matter what they look like.