A new collection of posts and comments from Mary Beard's blog appeared the same week that her Meeting the Romans began on BBC2. Both are engagingly demotic and cunningly argued. But the infamous debate surrounding this classics don during the last few weeks has largely concerned neither Romans nor blog, but hair, teeth and age, owing to AA Gill and Samantha Brick's egregious comments on Beard's TV appearance. Beard, offered many opportunities to reply, opted for the Daily Mail and delivered an edgily dignified riposte, gaining loud and extensive applause from those who follow her on Twitter. There has been much to savour in this battle, not least the fact that the thick rubber-soled shoes habitually worn by Beard have kicked against many prejudices concerning women in public roles. Intelligence and enthusiasm are, after all, what matter.
For those wanting to catch some of the best on Beard's blog, All in a Don's Day is a useful item. The views it contains were coined, not amid Mediterranean sunshine along the Appian Way, but late at night on the kitchen table. In this kind of space, with no cameras or producers to whip up animation, Beard's tone is more ruminative. The line of thought unfolds at an easy pace. The informality of the blog, and its brevity, acts like a mental bonne bouche: pungent and easy to consume. The appeal, as in Beard's TV programmes, lies in listening to a mind uncaged and engaged, provocative but not polemical.
Those unfamiliar with her blog might assume from this book's title that its terrain is largely that of college and campus. But academics are no longer cocooned in ivory towers. Few of them, admittedly, attend Bafta ceremonies, as Beard did after her TV documentary on Pompeii was shortlisted, or get invited on to the Today programme as often as she does. Yet when Beard claims to have notched up a 17-hour day, few of her peers will doubt her. Her dedication to teaching makes her a rueful observer of changes within education. "One day, I hope," she writes, "someone will look back on the way we spend all our time on process and paper trails (rather than doing the job and changing people's minds), and they will wonder where, when or why we forgot what we were really about."
A training in classical history and thought disciplines her analysis of present-day political systems and procedures. She is shrewd and funny about the blandness in electoral manifestos; teases out the implications of the report that Tony Blair read a chunk of Said Gadaffi's PhD thesis; and uncovers the absurd in the issue of equal primogeniture and the monarchy. As in her previous selection of posts, she includes after each blog a few of the commenters' remarks. Those published uphold her boast that most of her commenters are "courteous, on-topic and full of relevant learning (and languages)".
Most of these blogs are entertaining and relatively slight, but future historians will be grateful for this late-night activity in the kitchen. They may also come to agree with Beard's gentle aside, that the speed of electronic retrieval can work against good thinking. "Should we, I wondered, start a slow-thinking movement like slow cooking?"
Frances Spalding's Prunella Clough is published by Lund Humphries.
