Civilisations

Answering an age-old question with wit and wisdom Author Mary Beard Publisher Profile Books Price £15 Released Out now

If you’ve ever thought of Mary Beard as simply being a classicist interested in the ancient world, think again. In Civilisations: How do we Look & the Eye of Faith, a companion book to the recent hit TV series, art takes centre stage. Split into two parts, Beard first considers how the human figure has been portrayed throughout history and also the relationship between art and religion, all in a bid to understand what ‘civilisation’ actually means. The journey takes her from statues in Ancient Greece to backpackers snapping selfies at Angkor Wat, to Istanbul’s modern mosque and China’s infamous terracotta warriors.

While this double-feature has a natural break, it’s honestly hard to put the book down. Each chapter flows almost seamlessly into the next and the style hits the perfect point between engagingly anecdotal and authoritatively academic. Glossy photographs are displayed as anything from an inset image to a double-page picture and are evenly distributed rather than clumped together like the plates in most of today’s history books. Captions also provide translations of any writing and information about what’s happening in the image.

Even if you’re not interested in the history of art, this book is still well worth a read. There are many interesting titbits that relate to today’s views of the human body and how the ancient Greeks probably didn’t see it that much differently to us. If you’re looking to learn more on an interesting topic while being entertained by

Beard’s wit, this is a book you need to pick up.