LoveReading Says
Mary Beard, a Cambridge Don is also a blog enthusiast and It’s a Don’s Life is a selection of her pieces. Her field is classics and being a populist – of the best sort – these offer some lively and sometimes challenging views on the Ancients. Pieces on her life and work are interspersed making this an engaging look at history, education, the challenge of scholarship and the controversy that such forthright views can bring.
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It's a Don's Life Synopsis
Mary Beard's by now famous blog A Don's Life has been running on the TLS website for nearly three years. In it she has made her name as a wickedly subversive commentator on the world in which we live. Her central themes are the classics, universities and teaching - and much else besides. What are academics for? Who was the first African Roman emperor? Looting, ancient and modern. Are modern exams easier? Keep Lesbos for the Lesbians. Did St Valentine exist? What made the Romans laugh? That is just a small taste of this selection (and some of the responses) which will inform, occasionally provoke and cannot fail to entertain.
About This Edition
About Mary Beard
Mary Beard is a professor of classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, and the Classics editor of the TLS. She has world-wide academic acclaim, and is a fellow of the British Academy and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her previous books include the bestselling, Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii, Confronting the Classics, The Roman Triumph and The Parthenon. Her TLS blog has been collected in the books It’s a Don’s Life and All in a Don’s Day.
Mary Beard's Inheritance Books...
1. Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
The classic novel about what women want, or think they want, or don't. Is 'Reader, I married him' the ultimate happy ending or not? It's a book that changes in all kinds of interesting ways as you re-read it over a lifetime.
2. Homer, The Odyssey
At the very start of Western literature, the Odyssey underlies so much of what we read right down to the present day. A story of homecoming, temptation and the perilous boundary between civilisation and barbarism.
3. Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch
The liveliest and punchiest classic of feminism: something every woman and man should read. It still changes lives, like it changed mine.
Author photo © Catarina Turroni Lion TV
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