27 March 2014
The rise of historian and troll-slayer Professor Mary Beard continues with her inclusion in Prospect Magazine’s Top 50 World Thinkers list, which has also seen arch-atheist Richard Dawkins, overall winner last year but this time out of favour, while Pope Francis is in.
“I can’t say I’d ever imagined sharing space with His Holiness,” the Cambridge classicist tells me. “Perhaps I should follow his Latin Twitter feed.” But she adds: “Beard’s view is that, flattering as it is, one really should not take this too seriously.” When one appears on such a list, is one finally justified in referring to oneself in the third person?
