Dreamy animated images in detailed henna painting and atmospheric watercolours dominate a young Spanish artist’s moving journey of discovery. In a small bookshop in India, Inés comes across the feminist-utopian science fiction story “Sultana’s Dream.” It is about the terrible revenge on men, the bookseller explains. In the slim volume she wrote in 1905, Rokeya Hossain describes...
Mary Beard looks at some of the most famous nudes in art, from the Venus de Medici to Michelangelo's David, and argues controversy is nothing new.
In this four-part series classicist and historian, Professor Mary Beard draws on her immense scholarship, unique viewpoints and myth-busting approach to Roman history, to give her definitive take on the Roman Empire. Travelling from Spain to Iran, Egypt to Scotland, Tunisia to Greece, she‘ll pose the big questions that have fascinated people for centuries: how and why did it ha...
Mary enters the glitzy world of awards and prizes. There are hundreds: not just for books and movies, but poetry, museums and gardens. How do they influence what art is created and what culture we consume And has the pandemic helped us see beyond the glamour and red carpets and reassess what prizes are for Mary talks to Emmy-nominated actor Brian Cox and Bernardine Evaristo, ...
Two thousand years ago one of history's most notorious individuals was born. Professor Mary Beard embarks on an investigative journey to explore the life and times of Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus - better known to us as Caligula. Caligula has now become known as Rome's most capricious tyrant, and the stories told about him are some of the most extraordinary told abou...
In this 2x60' series, Prof. Mary Beard turns her quizzical eye on the most enduring subject in all of art: the Nude human figure. It seems paradoxical but also inevitable that in a ‘clothed’ society like ours we should have made and collected so many images of naked bodies now and in the past. Mary sets out to explore why and, although it’s a simple question, the answers she’ll...
Julius Caesar is the most famous Roman of them all: brutal conqueror, dictator and victim of a gruesome assassination on the Ides of March 44 BC. 2000 years on, he still shapes the world. He has given us some political slogans we still use today (Crossing the Rubicon), his name lives on in the month of July, and there is nothing new about Vladmir Putin's carefully cultivated mi...