Bettany Hughes

Quotes by Bettany Hughes

• It's become this sort of strange competition about who's in the coolest place, who's in the coolest street. Suddenly we're having to engage with all those social pressures. It's helpful, I find, as a mother and a teacher, to say you've always got a choice.

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• Istanbul in the snow is a wonder. The extravagant pleasures on show in the Topkapi Palace Museum - the sultan's robes thickly lined with squirrel fur, mobile foot-braziers to keep out a cold that whips relentlessly off the Bosphorus - presage modern-day sultanic delights.

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• After I graduated, I carried on with my academic work, via grants but I often had a market stall on Camden Market selling hand-painted silk to make some cash.

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• When you look at Istanbul, from Byzantium to the present day, it's striking how it has always been a city of the people, with a political voice, right from its early classical history.

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• I love the Bronze Age - the age of the Trojan Wars and Helen of Troy. Contrary to what people think, Troy was a very sophisticated society and they used ostrich eggs - which have surprisingly tough shells - to store perfumed oils.

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• Hapy, the ancient god of the Nile, depicted at Dendera with Cleopatra, is typically shown with breasts - symbolism that demonstrated how the life-giving gifts of Egypt's river artery come only when the power of both female and male was combined.

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• Rumour, gossip, slander - single drops of poison can pollute an entire system.

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• The occasional motivational speech gig tends to pay better than the books and television.

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• A lot of the clothes I wear on telly are second-hand.

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• I think it's ironic when Plato makes the learned woman Aspasia Socrates' teacher, but I think women crop up more in the Platonic dialogues than they do normally in texts of the period, and in an un-hysterical way.

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• My guilty pleasure at the end of the day is an old thesaurus. I know that can lead to overwriting, but if words such as lambent, pyretic and boscy exist, how sad they should stay recondite.

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• The presence of industrial quantities of Byzantine pottery dating from the sixth century AD on the headland at Tintagel, Chinese silk in the tombs around Mecca and 'Arabic' numerals in the 13th-century beams of Salisbury Cathedral tell us we have been interdependent not for decades but across millennia.

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• A journey through the Mediterranean is not only inspiring and stimulating, it is also humbling. The men and women who created antique treasures for us to marvel at had to deal with plague, genocide, a world without writing, iron tools, or penicillin - and yet they made something extraordinary of their life and times.

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• Taught by actor parents never to leave an awkward gap in the conversation I gabble out unsolicited responses to fill the voids.

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• As soon as men began to write, they made Helen of Troy their subject; for close on three thousand years she has been both the embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield... But who was she?

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• The Nile has long nourished women and men alike. On the Nile and the magical, river-island Temple of Philae, Florence Nightingale was so inspired that she resolved to follow her calling in nursing.

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