Piling Pelion on Ossa

Bettany Hughes is the Nigella Lawson of the classical world — all tumbling raven curls and smoky-voiced seduction, as she takes telly viewers through the greatest hits of the olden days; recent programmes have covered the Spartans, Athens and the Bible.

Bettany Hughes is the Nigella Lawson of the classical world — all tumbling raven curls and smoky-voiced seduction, as she takes telly viewers through the greatest hits of the olden days; recent programmes have covered the Spartans, Athens and the Bible. She’s just been on Radio 4 talking about Britain under the Romans. She’s no slouch on the academic side, either: a scholar at Oxford and a research fellow at King’s College, London, she got rave reviews for her first book on Helen of Troy.

And she’s certainly done her scholarly homework on her latest greatest hit —Socrates — taking in the primary texts in the original language, and a good chunk of the secondary ones.