Mary Beard gives a personal and provocative take on the nude in western art, from ancient Greece to the present. Just why do artists and viewers seem so obsessed by nudity?

How could a mediocre city in central Italy come to dominate such a huge area? What held the empire together and tore it apart? Mary Beard takes in the history and archaeology of the ancient world.

Professor Mary Beard looks beyond the stories of emperors, armies, guts and gore to meet the everyday people at the heart of ancient Rome's vast empire ...

Mary Beard is an everyday sort of heroine. She occupies public spaces – television screens, bookshop displays and magazine pages – with grey hair and no make-up. She takes on the vilest of ...

At some point during the two months that I didn’t see Mary, she grew a thick beard that completely covers her chin. When I saw the drastic and sudden (at least to me) change in her appearance ...

In new BBC Radio 4 series Being Roman, best-selling historian of the ancient world, Mary Beard, uncovers the stories of six fascinating people who lived at the height of Rome’s power ...

Dame Winifred Mary Beard, DBE, FSA, FBA is an English scholar of Ancient Roman civilization. The New Yorker characterises her as "learned but accessible". Beard is Professor of Classics at the ...