Dame Mary Beard

speaker

560 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Aug 2025 last heard Aug 2025

Dame Mary Beard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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That's how the Romans came.

That's how the Normans came and all that.

Actually, try thinking about it from the west and the north and coming south.

And suddenly you've upturned your view of how history works.

No, not quite yet.

I had two more things to do.

Somebody had sent a book proposal, and I thought, okay, this is the kind of thing that you fit into these odd hours, right?

So I read the book proposal, I commented on it, and I thought, tick that off.

And then my son, who works on Middle Eastern history –

had sent me a recent chapter that he'd written of a book that he's about to write.

And he said, oh, it doesn't matter when you comment on it, but I'd really love to know what you think.

So he's the one who we used to go to Cambridge United to go.

Sadly...

Lower league football didn't come into it very much.

It's about an extraordinary dissident journalist living between Cairo and Paris in the 19th century.

And so I read that or I read part of it and I kind of wrote to him and I thought, right, okay.

Any good?

Well, I think he's good, but I'm his mum.

And I corrected some of the, you know, what I thought were the infelicities of style.

You know, and he's got a very good eye for the subject.

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