Dan Snow's History Hit - History Legends: Mary Beard

Episode Date: January 3, 2021

This episode is the third of our History Legends podcasts, featuring Mary Beard.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everyone, welcome to Downsides History. We've got the last in our little mini-series, our little strand of legends, stars in the firmament of the historical um pantheon galaxy starscape um sky at night anyway here is

mary beard we've saved the best till last we've had eric foner go back and check that out we had michael wood both really wonderful conversations this conversation m Mary took place a couple of years ago. This is a rerun episode. Professor Mary Beard at Cambridge University is obviously a legend. She is pretty much the most famous historian broadcaster in the UK. Her fame has spread across the world. She's a classicist. She engages robustly on contemporary issues. She engages robustly on contemporary issues. She is a total legend. I went around to her house. We drank a lot of wine.

She put me right, fairly politely, on lots of things. And I was just given a glorious glimpse into what it must be like to be taught by her. She is a national treasure, and it was a great pleasure to have her on the podcast. This episode was hugely popular the first time it went out. I hope the rest of you who've joined this podcast journey subsequently enjoy it. If you want to listen to all the back episodes of this podcast without advertisements on the front, then you can do so at History Hit TV. It's also like a history channel. It's also basically the Netflix for history. You've got all the audio on there, got all the video, including the Christmas Truce,

now the worst watched programme in the history of History Hit TV. I should make a history podcast about the history of that another time. And you can do so at a special introductory rate. It's the January sale at the moment, everyone. You can use the code JANUARY, and then you get a month for free, and then your first three months for 80% off, which is a sweet deal. So go and check that out. Listen to Mary Beard, then go and check that out.

It's going to get you through these long winter months. We're going to get to the vaccine, everyone. And we're going to get you to the vaccine with very, very cheap access to history at TV. In the meantime, before you go and do that, this is Professor Mary Beard. Enjoy. very cheap access to history at TV. In the meantime, before you go and do that, this is Professor Mary Beard. Enjoy. Mary Beard, thank you so much for talking to me. It's a real

pleasure. Well, thanks. Now, why on earth does the ancient world continue to matter to us today? Well, that's the 64,000 dollar question. That question but come on let's take this straight into it now and if you look at the media the ordinary print online media you'd think it mattered to us because there were lessons that we could learn in ancient rome you know that we could think, OK... Republic turns into empire, it's all happening. President Trump is like Caligula.

And somehow the job of the historian is to kind of match up ancient Rome and its lessons with modern politics and a sense of prognostication. Now, I think that's charming, sweet and fun. And I do it all the time. But I think more to the point is that what the internet world does is that it helps us think harder about us. We don't learn lessons from it. You know, people used to say,

and it was deeply embarrassing, look, you know, had we known what a rough time the Romans had in Iraq, we would never have gotten there. I thought, well, there's millions of other reasons not to go to Iraq. We don't need to know about Trajan's problems. You know, this is kind of, you know, passing the buck, really. But I think what Romans do is that they help us see some of our problems

from the outside. They help us look at things in a different way. They help us think about actually the basic kind of ground rules of modern Western liberal, I suppose, liberal culture. They say, right, okay, what does citizenship mean? Now, Romans had a very different view of citizenship from us we don't need to follow it but it makes us say to ourselves look there's another way of looking at things when i always remember because i was sort of i was brought up with this you know on the the norman cricket test you know so they're those kind of damn immigrants and what you need to do is you need to go to the cricket match and you need to see whether they're supporting india or england and i think the real point is the romans have a completely

different version of that they knew that you could be a citizen of two places. You could be a citizen of Oppinum in Italy, of Aphrodisias in what we would call Turkey, and a citizen of Rome. And that there wasn't a conflict. Now, we might argue with them about the conflict, but actually they do kind of turn the question back on us and just say, why are we so certain about how we do what we do?

So history is about calling out bullshit. It's about questioning certainty. I don't know about bullshit. I think people use bullshit in a terrible way, actually. But it means usually what I don't know about bullshit. I think people use bullshit in a terrible way, actually. But it means usually what I don't agree with. But I think that history is about challenging certainty. It's about helping you to see yourself in a different guise, to see yourself from the outside.

So history is about the past, but it's also about imagining how you would look from the future. So, you know, one of the things it does is it teaches us to see, in my case, what seems so odd about the Romans. But it also helps you see what will seem so odd about us in 100 years, 200 years. What will students when they're doing the history of Britain in the 21st century, what will they be writing about? I can take a few guesses.

Okay, in that case, but why Rome then? Would this be true, I suppose it would be, if you were studying the Angevin Empire? In some ways, it's true of anything. In some ways, getting outside your box and becoming a kind of anthropologist of other cultures and yourself, every which one works.

I think why Rome and Greece, but particularly Rome matters so much, is that Rome is not only another culture, which it is, weird, strange, horrible, don't want to go there, but it's also a culture through which our forebears from 19th, 18th, 17th century, they have learnt to think. We learnt to think about politics, about right and wrong, about the problems of being a human being, about what it was to be good, about what it was to be, you know, proper, you know, in the forum or in bed, whatever.

We learn that from Rome. And, of course, we adjusted it, we renegotiated it. But, so, Rome is a kind of a brilliant paradigm for us because it's both utterly different and it makes us kind of think about real difference. And it makes us kind of think about real difference. And yet it's a culture which has somehow said, this is how you learn about what liberty is. This is how you learn about what the rights of the citizen is.

So we are both an interlocutor with Rome. We are both happily much better than ancient Rome. And we're also the descendants of ancient Rome. That's brilliant. But what strikes me about your programmes that you do so well is you call Rome a weird culture. And yet in your programmes, you're so famous for pointing out domestic object practices, ways of living that makes those intervening centuries disappear and stress our common humanity. Yeah, I think it's great fun. I think it's really important. If Rome was just weird, why would we be interested?

If we happen to know that there were men on Mars and they did things differently, well, fine, I'd be mildly interested, but so what what but what's interesting about rome is that they do things differently and are simultaneously completely familiar and yet in that familiarity they do things differently i mean i think one of the things we do on the

teleprograms you know and i it may be it cheap trick, but, you know, wherever we go, we go to the local Roman lavatories. Obviously. Yeah, of course you do. And, you know, I think people do think, cheap trick, you know.

It's easy to say, oh, this is where Romans, you know, sat and shat or whatever. But there's no better place for saying so where does the difference between us and them become clear there's no better place for getting particularly kids to say okay i can begin to kind of engage in this history um you know how did they sit here you know

do you think they kind of wiped their bottoms did they stand up did they sit down and you start to see in those rather kind of often rather over posh and probably very restored roman lavatories as far apart as timgad in algeria and ostia in it, you start to see a little problem about how you reconstruct Roman life, how you reconstruct what the rules were. We don't know whether these lavatories were all lined up in Rome. Was it unisex?

Was it globes only? We don't know about standing up, sitting down. We don't know about what the kind of you know, I don't know what the, currently what the conventions are in a male urinal. You don't want to know.

People tell me that you don't talk to the person next to you. I always imagine that you do. You're much nicer if you did. But when you come down to basics, you don't need to know a whole lot of technical detail about the past. You can actually make it sing for you by thinking, what was it like for someone to be there?

And how could I reconstruct that experience? Where do you find the past is most real to you, when you're sitting in this beautiful room looking at your copy of Tastus, or when you're sitting amongst an archaeological ruin in Portus on the coast of Italy? Well, they're both real, aren't they? I mean, I think that the past speaks to you. You have to keep it in a way in its place right i think one of the jobs of the historian is to keep the past in its place um but it speaks to you in a very different

way and i think that you know i there are some bits of ancient literature i've read that have always made me rethink who I was and rethink my politics. And I think the obvious example is Tacitus. He's ventriloquising a defeated person in South Scotland, defeated person in South Scotland, looking at what the impact of Roman rule is and saying they make a desert and they call it peace. There has never, ever been a more pithy summation of what military conquest is. And particularly in the 20th century of industrial warfare it became

truer than ever. It is. Tustis would be smiling in his grave because he showed us just what warfare and peacemaking what the

underbelly was. I remember I first read that when I was at school and I was doing Latin at school, Greek at school. I was a bit of a kind of bolshie little teenager. Don't believe that. No. True. And I remember suddenly thinking,

these Romans are speaking to me. You know, making a desert and calling it peace. You know, that's going to go on my tombstone, I think. And so I think, you know, there are bits of Roman literature which are so, not just moving, but they're so to the point. They're so politically acute that you can't ignore them. But also, I think the fun that I have is sort of putting that together to the point they're so politically acute that you can't ignore them but also i think the fun that i have is sort of putting that together with the day-to-day the ordinary you

know because most of the people we read about in roman literature are so damn you know you know upper class right and if you say okay let's think about what ordinary life is like. What's great about going around Roman sites, whether it's in house steds on Hadrian's Wall or Timgad in Algeria, is you start to see the real life of whether it's the Roman squaddy or the Roman civilian, and you start to kind of raise the other issues about how it was to exist in that world that we don't think about.

Well, it's so funny, sir, because I've always been fascinated, as a total amateur in Roman history, why you read Suetonius and the court historians, and they're describing a kind of litany of insanity and misrule and hedonism and all the rest of it. And yet, of course, there's this fact which is, despite civil wars and occasional major foreign incursions, the empire survives, longevity is, everyone's interested in longevity. So when you're looking at the difference between the source and then when you go on the ground,

what has that told you about the relationship between the imperial centre and the real life of these Romans around the periphery? That's a really good question. Right, my work here is done. That's a really good question. Thanks, Dan. And that's the question, because you know, one of the

big issues about thinking about the Roman Empire is how did the guy in the middle, or the guy in the middle with his advisors, how did they actually control anything? Well, you know, they could send a letter to what is now Turkey and it would take a couple of months to get there, by which time presumably any crisis was over.

And so, you know, it's tough to think that this is a, you know, what is it like to live in a world of not rapid communications, but also of autocracy? And there are clearly big things that happen. You know, Emperor Hadrian travels the empire. You know, he goes around, he meets people. He rather prefers the east to the west and the north, but he goes around and he makes his mark and he gives a vision of what it is to be a Roman emperor

visiting a community. Mostly, it can't have been like that. Mostly, it was guys learning how to use the new lavatories that had been just set up in their local town, really new, because, you know, they're sort of running water. And their relationship with roman power is you know at the very least it's mediated by the big guys in the local community the lower officials in the roman administration and rome in And Rome works because it... ..in a sense, because it leaves people alone, I suppose.

So the local elites, the accommodation with the local elites is fundamental understanding. Yeah, if you're going to do the big structural analysis of why the Roman Empire works, given it has, you know Given it has very few officials on the ground, very few troops really compared with the size of

the local population. It makes the British Empire look overstaffed. Then the only way you can see that it works is by collaboration. So it collaborates with the local elites.

The local elites do its dirty work. The peasant just knows he's paying tax to someone, but it doesn't much matter whether it's the Romans or the last guy who is asking for tax. the last guy who was asking for tax. And the Roman elite, the local elites, are, in a sense, drawn in by the excitement of being part of the imperial project. Now, we don't know how that works on the ground. I mean, Tustis is very cynical about it.

You know, he looks at Britain and says, ha, ha, ha, you know, so they all like the idea of baths and togas, ho, ho, ho, just another facet of their enslavement. But there were examples of elite Syrians, Brits, rising quite high in imperial hierarchies, enjoying patronage.

I mean, so it did work on one level, did it? Despite Tastus being rude about it. Yeah, Tastus saw the soft underbelly of it. I mean, I think that the only way it works is that they incorporate the outsider. it works is that they incorporate the upper echelons of the oppressed feel that they could get to be on the top. And so you see,

you get Roman emperors in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD who are actually, are actually born elsewhere. They're not people who think of themselves as Roman in terms of coming from Italy. So it's an incorporative empire. Now, in some ways, I think that's probably as nasty. Maybe it's as nasty an empire as any empire, but it's still a different version from ours

What about the dysfunction in the Imperial Centre? Does that have less of an impact because you've got these quite stable elites around the periphery or is the Imperial Centre less dysfunctional I don't know how we know how dysfunctional the Imperial Centre was

if you were to read about the centre of British politics in the second half of 2017, you would think that it was entirely dysfunctional. And we know that if we were to look at this with a longer viewpoint, we would partly think, yes, it was. But we'd also think that probably Britain has managed quite well for hundreds of years with a dysfunctional centre. We also think that the kind of crises that for us mean dysfunction,

you know, probably conceal the fact that there is a basically a perfectly decent system kind of trundling on exactly humming away beneath the bonnet away you know and and i think there is we can't see that in rome you know you can't you know you can go look at the imperial, what you know about the imperial bureaucracy. You know, it's hard to say, aha, that's the civil service. But somewhere under there, there is an imperial bureaucracy humming along. You're listening to History It with Mary Baird, all coming up after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores,

scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows,

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows

or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings

that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Talking about an incorporative empire, you've got in a lot of trouble recently, Mary, for talking about multiculturalism and parallels with the Roman world. I mean, is this an empire in which people had equal access? Would Rome have felt like New York today?

I mean, it's a thorny issue. Look, you know, Rome would not have felt quite like... I'm not sure I should talk about what New York today feels like. But, you know, Rome would not have felt quite like, you know, I'm not sure I should talk about what New York today feels like, because I think it probably feels quite exclusionary to some people in New York today, you know, who have no rights to work. So I think, you know, there's a problem about, there's always a problem about this kind of, you know, the dream of the open society. a problem about this kind of you know the dream of the open society but i think what's important about rome is it it is desire and its commitment to uh incorporate those that it conquers now that

doesn't mean that we think that conquest was nice. But Rome's distinction is its follow through. And it follows that through both in myth and in reality. So, you know, if you're a Roman, you say, where do we come from? Where are we Romans come from? Well, actually, we Romans, by the way, we're refugees. We came from troy you know there was a neus he was a refugee from war-torn troy and he founded a race he didn't actually found rome but he founded the roman race here in italy so their origin myth is one of the incorporation of Alicentius. That's the same is almost true with Romulus, who actually founded the city.

You know, he was sort of of the Roman race. But what does he do? You know, he kills his brother. He puts up a notice because he's got a new city and he hasn't got any citizens. He says, refugees welcome. Now, that is an extraordinary myth of origin in terms of how the ancient world sees this and how we see it, actually. And it's absolutely hardwired into the way Romans think about themselves.

But you see that, because they invented myth it wasn't wasn't true um you see that in terms of many of the things that the other people in the ancient world thought was odd about them so for example um when a roman citizen frees a slave as they did much more often it seems than other slave owning societies in the ancient world that slave who is freed becomes a Roman

citizen so there is a kind of absolute kind of feedback loop from the foreign, because originally most slaves are foreign, from the foreign into the idea of Roman citizenship. Now, we have a very, very ethnocentric view of citizenship. And I don't think that it's not, you know,

it would be mad to say we can just look at the Romans and do it their way. It would be different. But it is important, I think, to say, look, there is another community which, you know, which in the past, hugely successful empire, whatever you mean by successful, who actually worked on different principles from us. It doesn't say, I want you away from here, all you outsiders. It says, we're going to take you in. I also want to talk about women, because you've been doing a lot of work recently about women.

I'm really struck by every time I enter, I'm a generalist, every time I discover a new period and I talk to new historians specialists and I read wonderful new books they go this period is very unusual in that there's some very powerful women behind the scenes pulling strings and it seems to me that that just happens time and time again so have women actually been completely excluded from governance and with a few exceptions or has traditional tellings of history deliberately ignored or been unable to recognize the role that women have played in wielding real power? Sort of both of those, I guess. And every historian of every different culture always claims a particularly interesting role for their own women.

Exactly. But, you know, actually, get real, I suppose I say. actually get real I suppose I say and I don't want to be told that women in my period my period wielded power behind

the scenes that's what they always say and therefore I'm much more interested in the women of no doubt talent intelligence, flair, whatever, of how they were put down. And I think there are many, many ways of putting women down throughout history. And I think that also there are ways, and those are the ways in

which we still learn to put women down. I mean, I don't look back to the ancient world for role models of how women can be successful. You know, I think, you know, they're hardly mad. You know, gobby women got shut up in the period that I'm interested but I'm looking at the ways in which that has is was part of ancient culture and also in the ways that we have in some senses inherited largely indirectly but partly directly our view of women's exclusion from the public sphere from them why has women's exclusion been so persistent big question big question if i knew the answer to that i'd be really really famous popular even more famous right okay but what i Right, OK. But what I can tell you, I can't answer that question, but I can say there are ways in which our own exclusion of women from the public sphere

both pick up on and match and reprocess the exclusion of women from the public sphere in Western culture that has gone for 2,000 years. And one of the things that very, very much struck me recently was looking at the Clinton-Trump election campaign. And there were trompe souvenirs which portrayed actually a replay of the myth of the hero Perseus cutting off the head of the sneaky-locked Gorgon Medusa and so, in a sense, kind of proving his manly worth. What they did was that they picked up Cellini's sculpture of Perseus Medusa, still on display

in Florence, in the Piazza della Signoria, and what they did was they put Trump's face onto Perseus, the heroic murderer, as we say, and the bleeding, nasty, gun-oozing head of Medusa had Hillary Clinton's face. And out of that, I thought, just said, look, in the end, the clash, the gender clash between men and women violently played out in the ancient world is still a gender clash that we replay. And worse than that, I think, that this was something, you could buy this image on tote bags, on computer folders, coffee cups on t-shirts and the idea that somehow still we were buying into the decapitation of a powerful woman with her snaky locks and the same goes for theresa may it goes for angela

merkel if any other woman you know in. They're always represented as that awful, disruptive, dangerous, turn-you-to-a-stone woman that's Medusa. We're still doing it. Now, I thought it was very interesting because, you know, just after Trump had come to power, there was a bit of a, you know, mindless storm in a teacup.

You know, when a comedian, I thought in rather bad taste actually, holds up on television, you know, ahead of a decapitated Trump. And I thought, you know, not that, I don't want to do that, that's not nice. She loses her job. The comedian loses her job. of history, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth

now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. The previous 18 months, we'd seen images of a decapitated Hillary Clinton as kind of souvenirs. as kind of souvenirs. Now, if you want to say, where does the ancient world lie in our sensibilities? It lies right there, actually. Can you explain why the Romans created and built that trope? Because actually the Romans faced... And there's lots of interesting women in the Roman period from...

There's always lots of interesting women in the Roman period from... There's always lots of interesting women. But why did they... And why were they uniquely stigmatised and turned into... Some of Rome's most famous enemies were these women. Roman patriarchal culture, like every patriarchal culture, both fights and invents the danger of women. How do you justify patriarchy? Because I think that many individuals within patriarchy

are extremely anxious about what it's standing for. You invent the justification of patriarchy by inventing the danger of women. Women have to be dangerous. You have to show everybody that if you turn your back, the women will take over and wreck things. They'll make a mess of it. So Greek literature particularly,

and it's taken over in many respects by the Romans. Greek literature is full of women who are about to kill you, you know, are about to go mad. You know, there's, you know, the Amazons, the mythical race of warrior women on the margins who, you know, it is the job of every good Greek boy to stop, you know, I kill. You have glimpses in all kinds of Greek tragic drama of what is going to happen if women get in control, you know. So Clytemnestra is left alone when Agamemnon goes off to the Trojan War. You know, he happens to actually sacrifice their daughter when Agamemnon goes off to the Trojan War.

He happens to actually sacrifice their daughter in the run-up to this, what bad news. Takes up with all these slave girls. But he comes back, what has Clytemnestra done? She has taken over the state and then she kills him. So there is no way of being a powerful woman in antiquity in any public sense, who is not somehow undermined by the threat of death or, in a sense, the collapse of civilised values as we know it. And there are marvellous stories,

even about poor women who just get up to speak in the Roman forum because they want to say something. And their words will be reported as, she barked and yapped. You know, that somehow women don't talk in male language, they don't get listened to, but they're always dangerous dogs. Women are dangerous dogs. What's interesting about you, Mary Beard, is that you say that history needs to be kept distinct. You say it should be say it's not for our time.

And you say there are no lessons. And you spend a lot of time talking about the present when we're talking about history. Yeah, I absolutely agree with you, Dan. And I think that, for me, what I dislike about the use of Roman history is the kind of, the matching up scenario, you know, oh, we shouldn't do this because the Romans got it wrong, that's stupid.

But actually, you know, I think one of the reasons that it's still worth studying the ancient world is because we're still talking to it. We're still talking to it, we're still learning from it, we're still actually kind of negotiating our position in relation to antiquity. And so you can kind of, you can say that you're not interested in the ancient world, but nobody living in this country can escape the ancient world but nobody living in this country can escape the ancient well you can't get rid of it you know you know you can't get rid of it because it's filling your bloody teacups if you're in the united states you know it's still defining

how we think about women you know one of the things I was both pleased and sad to share with people quite recently was, you know, you go to the Odyssey, probably the second work of ancient literature, the second work of Western literature ever written. It's the story of Odysseus being in the Trojan War. He's got to get back to Penelope. And he's got a hell of a lot of difficulties getting back to his lovely wife. And how is this going to happen? The first book zooms down into Odysseus' palace. He's still trying to get back home. And there's Penelope. And she's got loads and loads of guys who want to marry her. It's a real pain.

And at one point, and I think it's an absolutely formative moment in Western culture, soon into the first book of the Odyssey, her young son, a rather whip-behind-the-ears teenager is there. But then he comes down, she's been doing women's stuff upstairs and she comes down and there's all these kind of guys who want to marry her

and there's a bard and he is strumming on his lyre and he's saying, and he's kind of telling, singing a song about how awful it is for the Trojan, about how awful it is for the Trojan, the Greek heroes, to get back from the Trojan War, come back home. It's terribly depressing. So Penelope says, excuse me,

I would really rather you sang a rather more cheerful number, actually. You know, perfectly reasonable request. Telemachus, this wet-behind-the-ears teenager, says, Shut up. Speech, public speech, is for men. Get back upstairs, Mum. Now, if you wanted a kind of... a symbolic start of Western culture's... erasure of the voice of women.

You don't need to look further. One of the very first works of Western literature in which a teenager, slightly not yet grown up, says to a savvy middle-aged woman, Stop talking. Speech is man's business it's my business upstairs to your loom and i think to some extent um you know i've been very lucky no it would be it would be wrong of me to say that i have been deprived of voice you have not been stuck to your loom i have not been stuck to my loom and i have not been stuck to my loom, and I've been very lucky. But I think that that basic idea that you don't hear what women say is still something that sticks. And when people light on things like how many people of colour there were in Roman Britain,

you write to me and say, you stupid. Put any kind of noun in there. You know, you just, you know, don't... You know, you're just silly. You don't understand this. You know, they're doing the Telemachus number. They're saying, shut up, woman. Get back to what you understand, knitting.

We're struck by Twitter when you get into your periodic fights with the rest of the world. And the people will tell men that they disagree with them and they'll be very rude about the opinion. But then with you they make it immediately about you as a person. Yes, they do.

Yes, they do. And I think it's I think there's a very interesting sense here that men are allowed to have wrong views. In the public sphere, men are allowed to have wrong, to say things that they regret, that are wrong. And they're told that what they said there was wrong. Women are told that, A, they're not allowed to voice it. I'm going to cut your head off and rape it.

So don't speak again, darling. Or they are stupid. Not that we happen to disagree, they are stupid. And I think that that came out, I think, very clearly around the election campaign in the different treatment of Diane Abbott and Boris Johnson, who both got it terribly wrong in radio interviews. Abbott didn't even begin to compute the cost of the new policing policy. And Johnson didn't seem to know a thing about the party's key aims in the post-manifesto world.

Abbott is treated as if somehow she's just not up to it. Boris is just wrapped over the knuckles and told to, oh, come on, Boris, get a grip. Now, nobody tells me to get a grip. They just tell me I am stupid. Are you going to leave this world? mean if you've got you've got it's a bit depressing because you've got 2 800 years since the odyssey of culture to contend with uh are you confident you're going to leave the next generation in a better place than where you

found it absolutely i mean um look uh when i yeah this is thinking very in very provoquial terms but you know when i came to the university of cambridge as an undergraduate there were about 12 women um were undergraduates and i stand with 50 you know that's 50 years and i think you know you know i think it's really important that women go on fighting this stuff and saying, you know, come on, you know, there's more to be done here. But also they do need to take a bit of time off to say, we've done, you know, a huge amount. My mum was born before women had a vote in parliamentary elections. You know, that's one generation. So, you know, I think at the same time as one goes on and on battling,

and also want to kind of raise a glass, as I'm about to do, to, you know, the successes that we've had. You know, there has been in my lifetime a revolution, and, you know, I'm a beneficiary of it. Can you pass me a glass? Oh, do you mind if I... Well,, I'm a beneficiary of it. Can you pass me a glass? Oh, do you mind if I... Well, I've been a beneficiary of it too. Thank you so much, Mary.

We're all a beneficiary. When the talents of women are exploited, we all benefit. We're all a beneficiary of our children. We're all a beneficiary of our children. We're all a beneficiary of our country. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand

if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free. Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review,

purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there, and I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome, but if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful.

Thank you. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. you