I'm having the time of my life

Classicist Mary Beard discusses her new podcast and how to sustain a 40-year marriage. Ella Walker reports

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CHATTING to classicist Dame Mary Beard makes you incredibly jealous of all the students who had her as their professor at Cambridge University.

Thoroughly engaging, her hands flying thoughtfully as she teases out ideas, the Shropshire-born 70-year-old and Fellow of Newnham College is beguiling and brilliant.

So it's good news for us all that she's launching a new podcast, Instant Classics, alongside writer Charlotte Higgins.

"Why haven't we done it before?' is the question I'm asking myself," she says, full of mirth, when quizzed on why now is the moment to join the podcasting ranks.

"The ancient Greek and Roman world is so with us. It's in our language, it's in our literature, in our theatres. There isn't really a podcast that takes that whole thing - what it was like then, how we understand it now, what the myths mean - and just works it over in a way that's fun, accessible, but also with a bit of bottom to it," she explains.

Yes, there's some great stuff on telly and radio about the Greeks and Romans but often, much of it is too reverential for Mary's liking.

With Instant Classics - there's a parallel book club running too, reading The Odyssey by Homer, ahead of Christopher Nolan's blockbuster adaptation, out next year - the plan is to show people "the ancient world's got more for them than they realise".

"It's not just stories of wars and battles and the fall of the Roman Empire," she says.