Yet if Beard's book is a vivid demonstration that sceptical scholarship can provide as gripping a read as sensationalism, that does not mean that the author shrinks from providing her own exploration of what life might actually have been like. In many ways, it is an extraordinarily vivid one. Her Pompeii is a city in which dogs howl, late-night drunks carouse, and everyone has bad breath. It is a city in which, as Beard points out with some glee, a household of perhaps some 30 people had only a single lavatory between them, and the crowds at the amphitheatre not even that: "20,000 people and nowhere but the stairs and corridors to take a piss." Above all, it is a city that is infinitely messier and less systematised than the guide books ever allow: where the presence of sexually explicit graffiti on a wall does not necessarily suggest a brothel, and where the baths, as well as providing a bather with "a place of wonder, pleasure and beauty", were so polluted that "they might also have killed him". Mary Beard says she has wanted to write about Pompeii for 'about 30 years', ever since she travelled there as an undergraduate with a passion for Roman archaeology. The old town has attracted its fair share of popular attention, from Frankie Howerd to Robert Harris, but rarely has it inspired the scrutiny of a classical scholar who confesses to a fascination with bad breath, Roman sex and 'the sheer puzzlement of it all. Where did they go to the loo in the amphitheatre?' Mary Beard attended an all-female direct grant school. During the summer she participated in archaeological excavations; this was initially to earn money for recreational spending, but she began to find the study of antiquity unexpectedly interesting. But it was not all that interested the young Beard. She had friends in many age groups, and a number of trangressions: "Playing around with other people's husbands when you were 17 was bad news. Yes, I was a very naughty girl." Oh Do Shut Up Dear! Mary Beard on the Public Voice of Women". Radio Times. Archived from the original on 1 August 2021 . Retrieved 1 August 2021.

BBC Two - Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town

TheBookOfPhobiaaAndManias traces the rich and thought-provoking history in which our fixations have taken shape. Thorpe, Vanessa (28 April 2012). "Mary Beard: the classicist with the common touch | Observer profile". The Guardian . Retrieved 3 December 2017. Defiant British Museum appoints Mary Beard as trustee". The Guardian. 28 March 2020 . Retrieved 5 December 2022.Chhibber, Ashley (3 May 2013). "Interview: Mary Beard". The Cambridge Student . Retrieved 29 January 2017. The first adventure in the Folio Society editions of ‘The Magic Faraway Tree’ series, Enid Blyton’s The Enchanted Wood features Jonathan Burton’s enchanting illustrations and a new introduction by Michael Morpurgo. Professor Mary Beard talks about her new history of ancient Rome book". The Independent. 23 October 2015 . Retrieved 7 December 2021.

Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town | Mary Beard | The Guardian Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town | Mary Beard | The Guardian

Opening in 1963 New York, to Renaissance Florence, to the birth of theatre in fifth-century Athens, and the Sex Pistols shattering Thatcherite Britain - take your seat for the history of performance. Ando, Clifford (29 February 2016). "The Rise and Rise of Rome". The New Rambler . Retrieved 24 May 2016. Irresistible by Joshua Paul Dale delves into the surprisingly ancient origins of Japan’s #kawaii culture and uncovers the cross-cultural pollination of the globalised world 🦊 There is nothing in this book that I’d call low quality. Even the chapter on Pompeii’s streets reveal fascinating insights into life around the time of Jesus. My favorite chapters, however, revolved around – you guessed it – the food, the wine, and the sex. When dealing with these topics, especially the latter, Beard gets to play to her ribald strengths. Here, she describes graffiti found within a bar (it should be noted that the asses referenced below refer to a monetary denomination and not, like, you know, asses): Mary Beard interview: 'I hadn't realised that there were people like". The Independent. 15 March 2013 . Retrieved 9 June 2018.You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. It was not until 1989 that she published the first book under her name alone – and it was nothing to do with classics. It was called the Good Working Mother’s Guide, a practical handbook that included advice on maternity benefit, how to interview a nanny, and the best way to hand-express milk (“First of all stroke or massage your breasts for a few minutes, starting from the top and working down and round towards the nipple … ”). It was an unlikely project for a young classics don, but was an example of Beard’s pedagogical instinct in action: reading it, you can sense she didn’t want to waste painfully acquired knowledge if it could be useful to others. “It’s true,” she told me, “that millions of women have sussed this and don’t immediately think: ‘I’ll write a book about it.’ But it seemed a fun thing to do.”

Pompeii - the Life of a Roman Town by Mary Beard | Goodreads Pompeii - the Life of a Roman Town by Mary Beard | Goodreads

HowTheTricolorGotItsStripes is a highly entertaining and likeable history of flags by Ukrainian ex-cabinet Minister Dmytro Dubilet and was originally published in Ukrainian 🇺🇦 The Invention of Jane Harrison (Harvard University Press, 2000); ISBN 0-674-00212-1 (About Jane Ellen Harrison, 1850–1928, one of the first female career academics) George Osborne in 'advanced' talks with Greek PM over return of Parthenon Marbles". The Telegraph. 3 December 2022 . Retrieved 4 December 2022– via www.telegraph.co.uk. Beard, Mary (8 September 2000). "The story of my rape". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077 . Retrieved 25 April 2019.The usual place for a Pompeian lavatory was in the kitchen. Hygiene aside, it presumably functioned as a convenient waste-disposal unit, in addition to its more familiar function. A few had shafts that dropped down into a running water supply, though the truth is that rich Pompeians were more interested in using piped water to run ornamental fountains than to make their ablutions more efficient. Many went directly into cesspits, and the remains still lingering in them today are a favourite target of archaeologists wanting to find out what really went in and out of Pompeian stomachs. a b Williams, Zoe (23 April 2016). "Mary Beard: 'The role of the academic is to make everything less simple' ". The Guardian . Retrieved 3 December 2017. Dowell, Ben (21 January 2013). "Mary Beard suffers 'truly vile' online abuse after Question Time". The Guardian . Retrieved 7 August 2013. Now, in a new book, the inventor of that test, the Cambridge classicist Mary Beard, has provided her own reconstruction of Pompeii. As her concern with dormice suggests, she is a historian who has always been fascinated by the stereotypes we have of ancient Rome: both how they came into being, and how valid they are likely to be. Indeed, such is the relish with which she goes about her myth-busting that it seems to reflect not scorn, but rather a wry affection for the myths themselves. What better theme for her, then, than Pompeii? After all, ever since excavations of the buried city began in the mid-18th century, it has provided us with the nearest thing we are ever likely to have to a freeze-frame from the ancient past - and yet many of our presumptions about what it can teach us turn out, on closer inspection, to crumble to dust. Hence what Beard, coining another catchy formula, terms the "Pompeii paradox": "that we simultaneously know a huge amount and very little about ancient life there".