This is more a novel about the tyranny of affluence than the problem of combining work and motherhood. We are even invited to view Reddy’s ludicrous workload as a form of altruism, motivated by the necessity to provide for two children whose care and education apparently cost about the same as running a small African state.To arrive at larger conclusions from this extreme set of circumstances would be perilous, yet that is what the main character invites us to do. If the men in the novel overlook her heroic efforts, she certainly makes up for it herself, indulging in a conspiracy of mutual self-pity with her female friends.Most of the themes of Seventies feminism appear here in populist form, with men infantilised, denigrated and finally idealised, as they always are in romantic novels. What really characterises Kate Reddy is a toxic combination of solipsism and sentimentality, especially where children are concerned. (My first queasy moment arrives when she stands outside her sleeping daughter’s bedroom, listening to her “princess sighs”.)It is also a book without politics, except of the blandest sort, amounting to little more than a suggestion that capitalism could be nicer to women.

This is all the more disheartening because Allison Pearson is a talented, intelligent journalist, who might have been expected to produce something more ambitious in her first attempt at fiction. Worse things have happened to women than having to choose, as her heroine eventually does, between living in a big house in London or one with a paddock in Derbyshire.. Before we even look at the text, the cover invites us to make judgements; and so becomes the epitome of this witty, humane and diligent book. Here is a picture, not of the Parthenon, but from the Parthenon, between two great capitals, as if seen by a child gazing through its mother’s legs (or two trunkless legs of stone) at the world beyond, of rubble (ruin or restoration?), heat, smog and hills. And at ourselves, gazing back, wondering what it once was, and what it is, and whether what we think we feel is what we really feel, and if it is what we are meant to feel.

There’s Julius Caesar, there’s Pompey, and there, down to the right, is .. well; it doesn’t matter. It’s a head; an idealised, “classical” head, possessed of symmetry, proportion, ideal beauty, and dispossessed of life. The others are not.You would recognise plump, anxiously bullish Pompey if you met him in the forum. His illusory regard (topped by his deliberately antique hairdo, consciously recalling Alexander the Great) is appropriate as a reflection of the gaze Beard turns in turn upon the Parthenon.Who is watcher, who is watched? Who is incorporating what past into what present? What do we see when we think we understand what we are looking at? How can we tell if our responses are genuine or pre-conditioned? And how can we approach something so universally praised as Pheidias’s great Temple of Athena, the crowning glory of the Athenian Acropolis … which the first real travel writer, Pausanias, hardly mentions?Beard’s Pausanias comes wonderfully to life, fussing and fretting about an Acropolis very different to the “bare rock … with just a few isolated monuments dramatically silhouetted against a clear sky” that we see now. He remembers a story about Theseus’s father, points to a group of Graces and explains how “everyone says” it was sculpted by Socrates (“much more likely the work of a second-division sculptor from Thebes, also called Socrates”, says Beard).