A01=Mary Beard
academic
angela merkel
Author_Mary Beard
cambridge
Category=JBSF1
Category=JBSF11
Category=NHTB
Elizabeth Warren
eq_bestseller
eq_history
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eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
feminism
feminist criticism
feminist scholars
forthcoming
gender studies
gendered violence
Herland
hillary clinton
historical
history
language of sexism
lectures
london review of books
LRB
Mary Beard Twitter row
medusa
misogyny
online abuse
rape threats
sexism
spqr
spqr a history of ancient rome
theresa may
trolls
twitter
wmarybeard
woman & power
woman and power
women and power
Product details
- ISBN 9781806492862
- Publication Date: 15 Oct 2026
- Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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THE NUMBER 1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
24 CONSECUTIVE WEEKS IN THE SUNDAY TIMES TOP 10
Why 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.
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 most recently SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome, and the bestselling, Wolfson Prize-winning Pompeii, The Roman Triumph, also The Parthenon and Confronting the Classics. Her blog has been collected in the books It's a Don's Life and All in a Don's Day.
