The Cambridge classicist says she works 14-15 hours every single day. Really?

Name: Dame Mary Beard.

Age: 64.

Appearance: Scholarly.

She’s the Cambridge University professor who likes Romans and tweeting, isn’t she? She is.

The professor who is catnip to mansplainers? I think we can safely say that Dame Mary gets a lot of bantz.

Must be a tiring life. It evidently is. On Saturday night, she asked other academics to share how many hours a week they work, adding: “My current estimate is over 100. I am a mug. But what is the norm in real life?”

“Over 100” hours of work each week? Is she serious? She insists she is, yes.

Isn’t that quite close to the limit of what’s physically possible? Probably.

Or slightly above the limit of what’s believable, perhaps? Well, some of the many, many replies certainly took that view. There are only 168 hours in a week, after all. If Beard sleeps a bare minimum of six hours a night, and works through every single weekend, that leaves about three and a half hours a day for everything that isn’t work.

All washing, dressing, eating, Twitter, socialising, going to the toilet, tidying, watching TV, shopping, exercise and hobbies, in three and a half hours, while chronically underslept? I guess so. “I have calculated carefully for the last few weeks,” Beard says. “Start work at 6, basically work through till about 11, with dinner break (no lunch).” Altogether, she reckons she works 14-15 hours every single day.

How long could a person keep that up without dying of exhaustion? Who knows? Beard admits there are some “grey areas” – travel, for instance.

What is she doing all that time? Lecturing, teaching, writing, interviewing Hillary Clinton, going on telly … Quite a lot is replying to messages from students. “I outsource cleaning, I confess,” she says. “My retired husband does the shopping and ‘maintenance’.”

Still, it must take extraordinary dedication and energy to work for more than 100 hours a week … Beard says she was only interested in the subject because of this week’s lecturers’ strike.

Naturally. “I was not intending to virtue-signal,” she says. “I deplore the culture of competitive martyrdom. But I tell you one thing … this is the last time I ask colleagues on Twitter about their workloads!!”

Do say: “She should get herself cloned by the biology department.”

Don’t say: “But what happens when we’re all working a four-day week?”