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The profile · researched 28 September 2026
Rome in two halves, with a quiz: Mary Beard takes the ancient world back on the road
Mary Beard, Professor Emerita of Classics at Cambridge, spent four decades making Roman history a mass-market proposition; at 71 she is chairing the Booker Prize, has a new book out with Profile, and is touring Britain and Ireland through October and November 2026.
Shropshire, and a case of 4,000-year-old bread
Mary Beard was born on 1 January 1955 in Much Wenlock, Shropshire, the only child of an architect who worked in Shrewsbury and a headmistress who read constantly. The origin story she keeps returning to is a trip to London in 1960, when a British Museum curator unlocked a display case so she could look at a piece of bread roughly 4,000 years old. She has described the effect using the Greek word thauma — wonder — and it is still the engine of the stage show: the shock of an object that survived when it had no business surviving.
From Shrewsbury High School she went to Newnham College, Cambridge, finishing a doctorate in 1982 on state religion in the late Roman Republic, read largely through Cicero. She lectured at King's College London from 1979 to 1983, returned to Newnham as a fellow in 1984, and was made Professor of Classics at Cambridge in 2004. She retired from the chair in 2022 and is now Professor Emerita. She has been candid that she never felt entirely at home as a Cambridge classicist in a discipline that was, for most of her career, run by men, and she is married to the Byzantine art historian Robin Cormack.
The books that got Rome out of the seminar room
The academic run — including The Roman Triumph in 2007 — turned into something much wider with Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town in 2008, which won the Wolfson History Prize the following year. Pompeii set the method she has used ever since: start from the rubbish, the graffiti, the tombstones and the plumbing rather than from the emperors, and let the big political story assemble itself out of the small evidence.
SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome followed in 2015 and became the book most people own without having studied classics. Women & Power, in 2017, took the same scholarship sideways into the question of why public speech by women still gets treated as an intrusion. Emperor of Rome arrived in 2023 and dismantled the biographical model of imperial history — not one mad Caligula after another, but the job description itself, the bureaucracy, the dinners, the impossible logistics of being looked at by an empire. Her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages.
Television, the TLS and a microphone
The broadcasting sits alongside the books rather than beneath them. Pompeii: Life and Death in a Roman Town went out on BBC Two in 2010, Meet the Romans with Mary Beard in 2012 and Caligula with Mary Beard in 2013. Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit followed in 2016, Julius Caesar Revealed on BBC One in 2018, and two episodes of the rebooted Civilisations in the same year. Since 2020 she has presented Inside Culture on BBC Two.
She is classics editor of the Times Literary Supplement, a role that has run in parallel with the professorship for years, and she co-hosts the podcast Instant Classics with the Guardian's chief culture writer, Charlotte Higgins, launched in 2026. The honours have accumulated without slowing any of it down: an OBE in 2013, the Princess of Asturias Award for Social Sciences and the Bodley Medal in 2016, a DBE in 2018, a British Museum trusteeship from 2020 and a National Trust ambassadorship in 2025.
Talking Classics, April 2026
The current book is Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old, published by Profile Books in April 2026 and built out of four lectures she gave at the University of Chicago in 2023. It is an argument rather than a survey. The classical world, she insists, is not a comfortable mirror but something unthinkingly alien in how it handled selfhood, bodies and identity — and the value of studying it lies in that friction. She makes the case for its disruptive history too, pointing to Marx, Mandela, Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale as readers who found something usable in antiquity.
The other argument is about who gets to do it. "Who wants to teach a subject that only posh boys can do?" she asked in April 2026, and the book is explicitly aimed at readers who have never thought much about classics at all. The defence of the humanities it ends on is practical: the discipline of reading difficult things is a working defence against fact-dodging, misreporting and fake news. NPR's June 2026 review credited her droll refusal of pious reverence towards her own subject. The book was launched on stage at the Royal Geographical Society in London on 19 April 2026, in conversation with the Oxford global historian Peter Frankopan.
Where she stands in September 2026
Beard chairs the judging panel for the Booker Prize 2026, a commitment she has described as reading 160 books in six months. The shortlist of six was announced on 25 September 2026 — M. John Harrison's The End of Everything, Marlon James's The Disappearers, Luke Kennard's Black Bag, Rebecca Perry's May We Feed the King, Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say and Douglas Stuart's John of John. The winner takes £50,000 and will be named in London on 9 November 2026, which falls in the middle of her touring autumn.
The live work is now a standing fixture rather than a book-promotion afterthought. The 2025 run, The Secret Histories of Ancient Rome, sold out. The follow-up, More Secret Histories of Ancient Rome, was announced on 23 July 2026 and the Belfast date at the Ulster Hall had gone before the tour opened.
What the evening actually is
The 2026 tour opens at Cadogan Hall in London on 6 October, with a simultaneous worldwide livestream, then runs to the King's Theatre in Glasgow on 11 October, York Barbican on 12 October, the Ulster Hall in Belfast on 14 October, the National Concert Hall in Dublin on 15 October, the New Theatre in Cardiff on 19 October, Liverpool Philharmonic Hall on 21 October, the Great Hall in Exeter on 28 October, Hall for Cornwall in Truro on 29 October, Norwich Theatre Royal on 1 November, G Live in Guildford on 2 November, Cambridge Corn Exchange on 4 November and Warwick Arts Centre in Coventry on 5 November. Tickets run from £14 to £61.50 and the show is recommended for ages twelve and over.
An Australasian leg trades under the title An Evening with Mary Beard: Talking Classics, with guest hosts interviewing her rather than a straight lecture; the Brisbane date at QPAC's Concert Hall is 24 November 2026, at the same running time, with signed copies of the book sold for collection on the night.
The show, now
The show runs one hour fifty minutes including a twenty-minute interval and splits cleanly in two: the first half on ordinary Romans — chariot racing, public speaking, graffiti and the startlingly detailed tombstones that record whole lives, including local material where she is playing, such as the Arbeia fort and the Hancock Museum's Roman holdings when she appeared in the north-east on 22 October 2025 — and the second half on the emperors and what Roman politics does and does not tell us about the present. There is no support act; Beard carries the stage alone with projected images of the objects she is discussing. Two things keep it from being a lecture: an audience quiz, and a live Q&A in which questions are submitted and upvoted through Slido rather than shouted from the stalls, which one attendee in 2025 reported produced a genuinely wide spread of questions, from single-inscription specifics to the general. She signs books afterwards. There is no broadsheet review of the 2026 run yet — the tour only opens at Cadogan Hall on 6 October — but the 2025 version sold out, the Belfast date sold out months ahead of the 2026 opening night, and attendee accounts consistently single out the same thing: that she is working from primary evidence in front of the audience rather than reciting a narrative. The Australasian dates in November 2026 use a different format, a conversation with guest hosts built around Talking Classics, plus audience questions.
Researched from fane.co.uk · fane.co.uk · atvtoday.co.uk · jennifercwilsonwriter.substack.com · en.wikipedia.org · irishtimes.com · wxxinews.org · timeout.com
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