Mary Beard

New York Times Bestseller National Book Critics Circle Finalist Wall Street Journal Best Books of 2015 Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2015 Economist Books of the Year 2015 New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of 2015 A sweeping, "magisterial" history of the Roman Empire from one of our foremost classicists shows why Rome remains "relevant to people many centuries later" Atlantic). "

A History of Ancient Rome

SPQR

A sweeping, revisionisthistory of the Roman Empire from one of our foremost classicists."

SPQR - A History of Ancient Rome

THE NUMBER 1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER24 CONSECUTIVE WEEKS IN THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10Why the popular resonance of 'mansplaining' (despite the intense dislike of the term felt by many men)? It hits home for us because it points straight to what it feels like not to be taken seriously: a bit like when I get lectured on Roman history on Twitter. Britain's best-known classicist Mary Beard, is also a committed and vocal feminist. With wry wit, she revisits the gender agenda and shows how history has treated powerful women. Her examples range from the classical world to the modern day, from Medusa and Athena to Theresa May and Hillary Clinton. Beard explores the cultural underpinnings of misogyny, considering the public voice of women, our cultural assumptions about women's relationship with power, and how powerful women resist being packaged into a male template. With personal reflections on her own experiences of the sexism and gendered aggression she has endured online, Mary asks: if women aren't perceived to be within the structures of power, isn't it power that we need to redefine?From the author of international bestseller SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.

A Manifesto

Women & Power

John Henderson

Explores the relationship between the contemporary world and the ancient one.

Classics: A Very Short Introduction

Mary Beard is one of the world's best-known classicists - a brilliant academic, with a rare gift for communicating with a wide audience both though her TV presenting and her books. In a series of sparkling essays, she explores our rich classical heritage - from Greek drama to Roman jokes, introducing some larger-than-life characters of classical history, such as Alexander the Great, Nero and Boudicca. She invites you into the places where Greeks and Romans lived and died, from the palace at Knossos to Cleopatra's Alexandria - and reveals the often hidden world of slaves. She takes a fresh look at both scholarly controversies and popular interpretations of the ancient world, from The Golden Bough to Asterix. The fruit of over thirty years in the world of classical scholarship, Confronting the Classics captures the world of antiquity and its modern significance with wit, verve and scholarly expertise.

Traditions, Adventures and Innovations

Confronting the Classics

From the bestselling author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, the fascinating story of how images of Roman autocrats have influenced art, culture, and the representation of power for more than 2,000 years What does the face of power look like? Who gets commemorated in art and why? And how do we react to statues of politicians we deplore? In this book—against a background of today’s “sculpture wars”—Mary Beard tells the story of how for more than two millennia portraits of the rich, powerful, and famous in the western world have been shaped by the image of Roman emperors, especially the “Twelve Caesars,” from the ruthless Julius Caesar to the fly-torturing Domitian. Twelve Caesars asks why these murderous autocrats have loomed so large in art from antiquity and the Renaissance to today, when hapless leaders are still caricatured as Neros fiddling while Rome burns. Beginning with the importance of imperial portraits in Roman politics, this richly illustrated book offers a tour through 2,000 years of art and cultural history, presenting a fresh look at works by artists from Memling and Mantegna to the nineteenth-century American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, as well as by generations of weavers, cabinetmakers, silversmiths, printers, and ceramicists. Rather than a story of a simple repetition of stable, blandly conservative images of imperial men and women, Twelve Caesars is an unexpected tale of changing identities, clueless or deliberate misidentifications, fakes, and often ambivalent representations of authority. From Beard’s reconstruction of Titian’s extraordinary lost Room of the Emperors to her reinterpretation of Henry VIII’s famous Caesarian tapestries, Twelve Caesars includes fascinating detective work and offers a gripping story of some of the most challenging and disturbing portraits of power ever created. Published in association with the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern

Twelve Caesars

Conceived as a gorgeously illustrated accompaniment to "How Do We Look" and "The Eye of Faith," the famed Civilisations shows on PBS, renowned classicist Mary Beard has created this elegant volume on how we have looked at art. Focusing in Part I on the Olmec heads of early Mesoamerica, the colossal statues of the pharaoh Amenhotep III, and the nudes of classical Greece, Beard explores the power, hierarchy, and gender politics of the art of the ancient world, and explains how it came to define the so-called civilized world. In Part II, Beard chronicles some of the most breathtaking religious imagery ever made--whether at Angkor Wat, Ravenna, Venice, or in the art of Jewish and Islamic calligraphers-- to show how all religions, ancient and modern, have faced irreconcilable problems in trying to picture the divine. With this classic volume, Beard redefines the Western-and male-centric legacies of Ernst Gombrich and Kenneth Clark.

The Body, the Divine, and the Question of Civilization

How Do We Look

Pompeii lost and found

The fires of Vesuvius

From its political and religious systems to slavery and attitudes toward sex, the ruins of this ancient Roman city are explored in a study that brings to light new facts about the way the people of Pompeii lived prior to meeting their devastating end in 79 CE.

Pompeii Lost and Found

The Fires of Vesuvius

S.P.Q.R.

John North

Reader in Classics Mary Beard

Simon Price

Lecturer in Ancient History and Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall Simon Price

A comprehensive and radical new survey of religious life in Rome over the course of a millennium.

Religions of Rome: Volume 1, A History

Ein Manifest

Frauen und Macht

The headings of Mary Beard's notes give a taste of this astonishing book: Bad Breath, Intestinal Parasites, Performing Monkeys, One-way Streets, Kosher Food, Water Shortages. The Temple of Isis serves to bring in multiculturalism. The House of the Menander tells how a house worked. At the Suburban Baths we go from communal bathing to hygiene to erotica. 154 writing tablets from the House of Caecilius Jucundus detail the accounts of its owner. A fast-food joint on the Via dell' Abbondanza introduces food and drink and diets and street life. These are just a few of the strands that make up an extraordinary and involving portrait of an ancient town, its life and its continuing re-discovery, by Britain's leading classicist.

The Life of a Roman Town

Pompeii

Draws on a wide range of period writings, from essays on rhetoric to a surviving joke book, to explore the culture of humor in ancient Rome, offering insight into what was considered funny at the time and how everyday Romans expressed their humor. By the author of The Fires of Vesuvius.

On Joking, Tickling, and Cracking Up

Laughter in Ancient Rome

Michael Crawford

Rome in the Late Republic

Bir Manifesto

Kadin ve Iktidar Ciltli

Mujeres y poder. Un manifiesto

In her now famous 'Timesonline' blog, Mary Beard has made her name as a wickedly subversive commentator on the world in which we live. Her central themes are classics, the universities and teaching, but there is much else besides. This selection will inform and provoke and cannot fail to entertain.

Mary Beard

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