This episode of the LRB podcast is the first in an ongoing and occasional collaboration with Talking Politics, a weekly podcast with David Rundsman.

You can find Talking Politics in iTunes, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hello, my name is David Rundsaman, and this is Talking Politics.

This week we're talking to Mary Beard about women in power.

It's one of a series of conversations we'll be doing over the next year

in conjunction with London Review of books,

talking to some of their writers about some of the things that they're writing and doing with the LRB.

How do we think about women's intellects? How do we think they're smart? In what way can a woman

be clever? You know, if you go back to the ancient world, people say, oh look, Greeks and Romans

they had a woman goddess of wisdom. No, they Jollywell didn't. They had an androgen who was a virgin and not even

born from a woman was their goddess of wisdom. So there is no way for women to be wise. We'll be

coming to that conversation a little bit later. First of all, we're going to catch up on British

politics because we've neglected that a little, I think, with other things going on.

And this week there are two big by-elections.

So I've got Helen, Thompson and Chris Brooke here.

The by-elections are in Stoke on Trent and Copeland in Cumbria.

They are both being held as a result of the sitting MPs standing down to take up other job opportunities

and the jobs are sort of symbolic of these MPs distance from the Corbyn project.

Jamie Reed in Copeland is rejoining the nuclear industry and Tristram Hunt in Stoke-on-Trent

is leaving to become director of the VNA.

I know Jeremy Corbyn is a big fan of the arts, but I don't think the VNA is exactly his model of a socialist arts policy.

But that's not what this is about. It's not about who was there before. It's about who might win.

...