Mary Beard event announced

Mary Beard has promoted a live April 17 appearance at Ely Cathedral, where she and Cambridge classicist Carrie Vout are set to discuss classics in public. (x.com) The event is scheduled for Friday, April 17, at Ely Cathedral in Cambridgeshire, and Beard flagged it on X two days before her new book *Talking Classics* is published on April 16. (x.com) (profilebooks.com) Beard’s publisher says *Talking Classics: The Shock of the Old* is a 192-page hardback from Profile Books priced at £16.99, with ebook and audiobook editions also listed. (profilebooks.com) The book is built around Beard’s argument that Greece and Rome still shape how modern readers think, and Radio Times reported this week that it distills three lectures she gave at the University of Chicago in 2023. (profilebooks.com) (radiotimes.com) Vout, who is usually known as Caroline Vout in university listings, is Professor of Classics at the University of Cambridge and Director of Cambridge’s Museum of Classical Archaeology. (classics.cam.ac.uk 1) (classics.cam.ac.uk 2) Her work sits at the overlap of classical literature, archaeology and art history, and Christ’s College Cambridge lists books including *Classical Art: a Life History from Antiquity to the Present* and *Exposed: The Greek and Roman Body*. (christs.cam.ac.uk) (profilebooks.com) The pairing puts two of Cambridge’s best-known public classicists on the same stage at a moment when Beard is explicitly arguing that classics is not only an academic subject but a live public conversation. (radiotimes.com) (profilebooks.com) Ely Cathedral regularly hosts public events alongside worship and music programming, and its events calendar shows a run of cultural dates through spring and summer 2026. (elycathedral.org) For readers who know Beard mainly from *SPQR*, BBC appearances or newspaper columns, the April 17 stop looks less like a one-off signing than a launch-week conversation about why the ancient world still draws large public audiences. (profilebooks.com) (radiotimes.com)