Professor Dame Mary Beard
Rosebud with Gyles Brandreth
Gyles Brandreth / Plain Jaine Media
4.6 • 2.2K Ratings
🗓️ 5 September 2025
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Our guest today is one of the UK's best known and best loved public intellectuals, the classicist and expert on Roman history Professor Dame Mary Beard. Mary tells Gyles about her country childhood in Shropshire, playing on a disused railway track and trying to memorise Jane Eyre by heart. She talks about her interesting parents - a headmistress and a "raffish" historical buildings architect, and about the alarming visits up ladders into church belfries she made with her dad. She talks about Cambridge, sexism, and discusses interesting questions such as 'how to think' with Gyles. She talks about her early relationships with men and she describes the chain of events which led to her being raped in Italy as a student. She talks about the challenges of being a public intellectual, and about her aversion to risk aversion!
As you can tell, this is a wide-ranging and fascinating discussion. Enjoy this.
NB this episode contains some discussion of a rape, which is not graphic, but you may want to be mindful of this if listening with children.
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Transcript
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| 0:31.6 | Give me an a, give me an O, give me an S, give me an E, give me a B, give me a U, give me a D, give me Rosebud. |
| 0:43.7 | Cue the music. To celebrate the end of the second year of Rosebud and the beginning of the third year of Rosebud, |
| 1:12.2 | we've had a string of dames on Rosebud, Dame Eileen Atkins, Dame Judy Dench, |
| 1:19.0 | and I thought, well, actually, let's not have a theatrical dame to launch our third year. |
| 1:25.0 | Let's have perhaps the most brilliant dame in the world. Intellectually, |
| 1:31.3 | there's no one quite like her. If you know anything about ancient Rome or ancient Greece, |
| 1:37.0 | it could well be because you've read one of her books or seen one of her remarkable television |
| 1:42.3 | programs. I'm talking, of course, about Dame Mary Beard. |
| 1:46.8 | English classicist, specialising in ancient Rome, |
| 1:50.0 | trustee of the British Museum, |
| 1:52.3 | fellow of Newham College, Cambridge. |
| 1:54.7 | She is, well, she's a brainbox, |
| 1:57.4 | but there's much more to her than that. |
| 1:59.7 | So many things are fascinating about Mary Beard. |
| 2:02.2 | One of the most fascinating, I think, is she's steeped in what the world was like |
| 2:06.5 | two thousand years ago, and yet she's so alive today. And what we're talking about |
| 2:13.3 | is who Mary Beard is now. Enjoy this as we launch our third year, |
| 2:19.9 | welcome to Rosebud with Dame Mary Beard. |
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