Professor Mary Beard
speaker
662 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 1 May
Professor Mary Beard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's a great age of culture.
It is a huge literary renaissance.
Not quite clear what Nero's role in that is, but it certainly is.
So he himself performs.
It is said that perhaps it wasn't as brilliant as he liked to be told it was.
LAUGHTER
And they're amazing stories.
It's sort of like hiring out the theatre and getting all your friends to come.
Nero does go a stage further.
So he locks the theatre doors so that once you've got in, so it is said.
And that in order to get out, people used to fake their deaths so they could be carried out.
Women gave birth because they couldn't get out once they got in and the baby came.
And they were forced to flatter him.
They were forced to say, blimey, you're brilliant, Nero.
Now, there is something pretty ludicrous and pretty unpleasant about flattery.
But again, I think it's a place where we need perhaps to stop and say, well, would we say to Prince William or President Trump or someone like that, after seeing them perform, I think that was a really lousy show.
Maybe.
It's where the boundary is between the gossip and the hiding in plain sight that's very hard to fix.
Well, he went round all the major games, the Olympic Games, the Isthmian Games and all the others.
And he won everything.
Showing 81–100 of 662 · page 5 of 34
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