Mary Beard

Beard is a professor of classics at Cambridge who has spent a career arguing that the ancient world is neither remote nor tidy. SPQR retells a thousand years of Rome with the slaves, the poor and the women left in. She presents television history and writes for the Times Literary Supplement, which brought her online abuse severe enough that she began publishing the messages and replying to the senders; one student who had abused her apologised, and she later gave him a reference. Women and Power is the short book that came out of that period.