On Saturday I supported a super-star. Mary Beard is doing a six theatre tour promoting her latest book – ‘Emperor of Rome’, currently Britain’s No.1 best seller. I was asked to interview her at York Opera House although the photograph shows us together, not in that great city (established by the Romans) but Gibraltar, where Mary and I met at a literary festival last year.

Mary is that rarity – a celebrity with no sense of her celebrity status and an academic who wears her enormous knowledge lightly.

The theatre was completely sold-out for her fascinating take on Rome’s period of one-man rule between Caesar crossing the Rubicon and the end of Empire (at least in the West, as Mary explained it lasted in parts of the East until the 15th century).
A wonderful evening talking about a fabulous book.