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1. At the birth of society and civilisation I find a religious landscape littered with feisty female deities who make wisdom their business.
2. History was invented as a tool, an engineered road down which human society could advance.
3. Venus, ancient goddess of love and beauty, is an apparently irrelevant, invented deity of the long dead. But Venus merits scrutiny. Chart her life story across 5,000 years and you chart the evolution of our conflicted relationship with sex and with the female body.
4. 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.
5. By day I am a historian, by night a broadcaster.
6. Forgiveness gives you a chance to be fulfilled rather than be eaten up with anger.
7. I cannot write history unless I travel to the places where it happened. I spent a lot of time walking around the Eastern Mediterranean, going to all the shrines that Socrates would have worshiped at, going to all the battlefields that he fought on.
8. Time and time again in history, it’s the emotional argument that wins. Probably since 70,000 BC we’ve been making decisions in a similar way.
9. 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.
10. Plants are so important to the ancients for medicine and in a religious aspect — and in hemlock!
11. Children hop around Phylakopi on sea-polished pebbles the size of bean bags and bask themselves, alongside the lizards, astride the sturdily built walls of Iron Age homes.
12. Europe’s leaders need to sit down with Socrates for a night; a life unexamined is not worth living. We have to remember that, as he says, the pursuit of wealth should never be at the expense of wisdom.
13. Taught by actor parents never to leave an awkward gap in the conversation I gabble out unsolicited responses to fill the voids.
14. I’m horrified at the idea of intimidating someone. I think that’s the opposite of what we should be doing.
15. Both my parents were professional actors, so I grew up in a household that had no real financial stability.
16. Religion is an easy target for accusations of repression and misogyny, but achievement in the sacred and therefore socio-political sphere was often an option for women, thanks not to brawn, but to brain.
17. You’re a good presenter if you know your subject and you can communicate it with passion. Period. That’s all that matters on telly.
18. Up until 1400BC, citadel settlements are stable. Goddesses — notably in charge of fertility and learning — have a crucial role to play. But as civilisation gets greedy and society more militaristic, these wise women are edged to the sidelines in favour of a thundering, male warrior god.
19. When she stepped out of that spumy sea Aphrodite was said to have brought fertility, flowers, life, light to a barren world. For centuries women and men went to her sanctuaries to seek her pity and protection. Her domain was originally not just lust, but lust for life.
20. The massive grassroots success of movies such as Zack Snyder’s Spartan gore-fest ‘300’ demonstrates there is a vast appetite among 15–25 year olds to share in the experience of the long-dead.