Quotes from Bettany Hughes

The occasional motivational speech gig tends to pay better than the books and television.

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.

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.

If the Halcyon days of a Mediterranean winter, god-blessed, were good enough for sublime kingfishers they should certainly have something to offer us all.

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.

Nefertiti is lovely, but we should use our wit and will to look beyond that beautiful face to discover and to enjoy a more satisfying narrative - the story of mankind, not just of man.

The Nile has long nourished women and men alike. On the Nile and the magical, river-island Temple of Philae, Florence Nightingale was so inspired that she resolved to follow her calling in nursing.

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.

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.

My guilty pleasure at the end of the day is an old thesaurus. I know that can lead to overwriting, but if words such as lambent, pyretic and boscy exist, how sad they should stay recondite.

Forgiveness gives you a chance to be fulfilled rather than be eaten up with anger.

People seek change not only when threats and opportunities appear, but when we get tired of the ways things are.

I travel all over the world, but I'm never happier than when I'm walking up the hill to pick up my children from school.

By day I am a historian, by night a broadcaster.

Economic, political and military intervention following the first world war is frequently blamed for current friction between east and west.

Of all the human figurines discovered so far from 30,000-3,000BC, 92% are of the female form. This is not to say there was any kind of matriarchy or worship of a mother goddess - far from it - but women are conspicuous by their presence.

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.

We think the way we do partly because Socrates thought the way he did. His basic idea - that the unexamined life is not worth living - is what it means to live in the modern world, to develop ideas and ask questions.

Slipping down into the bedrock 100m inside the partially excavated tomb of Pharaoh Senwosret at Abydos, I really thought I was going to die. Oxygen levels are dangerously low and, with over 90 per cent humidity, it was hard to breathe - we were all drenched with sweat.

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.

History was invented as a tool, an engineered road down which human society could advance.

often women aren't allowed to be characters in history, they have to be stereotypes. Cleopatra was a poet and a philosopher, she was incredibly good at maths; she wasn't that much of a looker. But when we think of her, we think: big breasted seductress bathing in milk. Often, even when women have made their mark and they are remembered by history, we are offered a fantasy version of their lives.

Herodotus, the 'Father of History', records the moment – and you can hear the emotion in his voice as he does so, a mixture of horror and awe: Then Kleisthenes took into his faction the common people.19

Socrates argued that only God can be a sophist, only God can be truly wise.