Bettany Hughes
The occasional motivational speech gig tends to pay better than the books and television.Collection: Motivational
Forgiveness gives you a chance to be fulfilled rather than be eaten up with anger.Collection: Anger
I think it's ironic when Plato makes the learned woman Aspasia Socrates' teacher, but I think women crop up more in the Platonic dialogues than they do normally in texts of the period, and in an un-hysterical way.Collection: Teacher
Cricket's in the blood - my dad loves it and my brother Simon played for Middlesex before becoming a radio and TV cricket commentator.Collection: Dad
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.Collection: Relationship
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.Collection: Dating
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.Collection: Wisdom
For the Spartans, it wasn’t walls or magnificent public buildings that made a city; it was their own ideals. In essence, Sparta was a city of the head and the heart. And it existed in its purest form in the disciplined march of a hoplite phalanx on their way to war!Collection: Wall
Peter Jones's is a vital public service. He reminds us that while we shouldn't live in the past, we are wiser and stronger when we live with it.Collection: Past