I'm exploring the long history of women, first of all, being silenced and, secondly, not being taken seriously in the political and public sphere. It's a call to action through understanding and through looking at ourselves again and trying to reformulate the whole question of women and power.
The building blocks of discrimination tend to be similar wherever you find them.
What interests me is the idea that classics is actually quite democratic. It isn't only the toff, upper-class subject it's often thought to be. Every generation enjoys rediscovering it.
English country towns are often seen as a cultural wasteland, but the more cut off you are, the more the need to create things, to make your own culture.
Democracy requires information. Plato knew that informed decision-making requires knowledge.
I was 11 when I started Latin - not like boys, who start early at prep school. At 14, you had to choose whether to start Greek and drop German, but my mum made a fuss, and I took Latin, Greek, French, and German at O-level, which meant I didn't do much science.
We lived in the schoolhouse of the village school in Church Preen, in deepest Shropshire, and my mum was the schoolmistress. She taught the juniors, and one other teacher taught the infants. I went there from the age of three, no doubt as a form of childcare.
There's plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.
The web is democratising and also the voice of people who don't think they have another outlet. And that voice can be punitive.
Nobody but an idiot would pretend that they had an error-proof way of choosing the 'best' out of hundreds of perfectly qualified applicants - not for university or for anything.
Roman military tactics were much over-rated. All the clever ones had the same idea, which was to go round the back.
When I am making a TV show, I am looking for engagement, not admiration.
I was into Black Power, and my practice Oxbridge essay was a rant. The headmistress said I'd never get in with that, but she was probably wrong. I was the ideal combination: a swot who was also a bad girl.
Thinking through how you look to your enemies is helpful. That doesn't mean that your ideology is wrong and theirs is right, but maybe you have to recognise that they have one - and that it may be logically coherent. Which may be uncomfortable.
If being a decent soul is being maternal, then fine.
One of the great things about history is that it sort of isn't a done deal - ever. The historical texts and the historical evidence that you use is always somehow giving you different answers because you're asking it different questions.
When it comes to silencing women, Western culture has had thousands of years of practice.
If you say to a group of women professors, 'Close your eyes and think of a professor,' what they will see is a guy. I will. And I'll stop myself and think, 'Hey, hang on, what am I doing here?'
The thing about being a university teacher is that you're fairly tolerant about young people saying things they shouldn't have said.
What is the role of an academic - no matter what they're teaching - within political debate? It has to be that they make issues more complicated. The role of the academic is to make everything less simple.
