Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Cambridge Professor of Classics known for her passionate commentary on the relevance of ancient Rome to modern politics and power.
On the island
Eight records
It's All Over Now, Baby BlueFavourite
Bob Dylan is the only musician that a whole of my family can listen to with pleasure.
it's a lovely piece of music which is so terribly sad I don't think you can listen to it too often on your island. But what it reminds me of is, you know, seeing the back story of European literature through it.
I don't want all my things to have words to them. And if you listen to the Desert Island and it's all words, it would get you down. And also this makes me feel so terribly English listening to this darland.
Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves
Eurythmics and Aretha Franklin
I went at a single sex girls' school and I've been proud to be at Newnham College in Cambridge for most of my life since then, and it's a wonderful place to be, and it's partly made me what I am, and sisters are doing it for themselves, is what it's all about, really.
The Man That Waters the Workers' Beer
Roy Harris and the Pump and Pluck Band
It's the kind of left-wing anthem that I like because it isn't puritanical. I can't bear the puritanical left. I like to celebrate the drunkenness of the working class and me.
The one thing that I was very sad about in terms of what the nine eleven business was that people thought I hated America. I love America and talking about uh particular forms of American politics is completely different from loving the place.
this is really for my uh husband who decided rather late in life that he would learn to play the hopsichord, and he's currently managing Eau Claire de la Lune, not badly.
Endless Pleasure, Endless Love
I really love classics, and I love the way that the ancient world has. Helped us think about almost everything that there is worth thinking about... it's wonderfully reworked by Handel in this opera as a kind of story of the blindness and stupidity of passion.
In conversation
Presenter asks
0:51Is intellectual life, Mary Beard, is about having a bit of a ding-dong, is it? Having a good old argument.
Having a good old argument. It's about having an argument and it's about it's about cutting through the count, I think, that an awful lot of public debate sort of is is buried in.
Presenter asks
2:24Do you think it's important that academia, if not the classics, that academia is relevant? Do you feel it has to justify its very existence, given, of course, that it is publicly funded?
I mean, I think that's a complicated one because even when scientists start out, they don't know which is going to be the discovery that they've made that is going to save millions of lives... some of the things that you do only pay fruit fifty, a hundred years later, and often those are the best ideas.
Presenter asks
6:06You say your father [was] a wastrel. An interesting word. What? A drinker? A womanising drinker?
Alcohol was their favourite hobby. Waste was unfair. He was slightly laid back. A man who was never going to make too much of a profit because he had too many fun things to do. I remember them as being different from other people's parents.
The keepsakes
The book
Treasures of the British Museum
Marjorie Caygill
what I was going to miss on this desert island was things, it was going to be objects. And so I chose a wonderful book ... It is lavishly illustrated with all the things I'm going to miss.
The luxury
I thought I might arrange a loan of the Elgin Marbles, because I could then really enjoy them up close and personal.
Presenter asks
18:08How did you manage all of that [family and career] at once? Did you at any point feel as though you were going half mad?
Half mad. Yes. Yes... I think you get to a point where you're just on autopilot. You've got two kids under three. You've got a full-time job. And in the end, you haven't got any money either. You you're terribly happy because it is a happy time. But you are absolutely crippled in in terms of energy and all the rest.
Presenter asks
23:10You stand by that [what you wrote about September 11th]?
Yeah. Yes. I stand by what I meant by that... what I was saying is that there was a logical consequence of unfair and imbalanced geopolitics, which if you have a world superpower and if some people feel themselves utterly disempowered in the world order. Their only recourse is going to be to what we like to dismiss as terrorism.
“I'm not sure I could say that ancient Rome was relevant to current concerns. But I do think that it can speak to us and it can make us see our own world differently.”
“I thought I was being heroic. I thought I had, you know, breasts exploding with milk. I had to go home and feed the baby. And I thought this was heroism. What these guys remembered was that I didn't stay till the end of the meeting. They didn't remember the heroism. They remembered the dereliction of duty.”
“I'm the kind of person that can't even shut myself in my office for a morning to write. I've got a very, very, very low concent short concentration span... if I'm not in the swim of things, I get a bored, I b cry because I can't write things”