BETTANY Hughes could feel a bit prickly about being introduced as "the Nigella Lawson of history". She has decided not to. She has decided to take it as it is meant, as a compliment.

"The feminist in me told me I should get upset about it," says Britain's glamour historian at Writers' Week.

"But when I sat down and thought about it, well, the fact is that Nigella is a very intelligent woman. She is very good at what she does. She has made a great success in communicating her passion for a certain subject to a wider audience and, in fact, she is quite similar to me and what I like to do.

"And I am lucky to have hit a time when people have realised how important the past is."

Bettany Hughes, 38, has become the new television face of history. As a specialist in ancient history with a lively tome on Helen of Troy just out on the shelves, she has been making history documentaries for the BBC - on the Spartans, the Minoans and, most recently, Helen of Troy.

There's a small thrill of spite in her television success. Hughes loves to relate the tale of when, fresh out of Oxford with a BA MA Hons in Ancient and Modern History, she approached a television executive with a proposal for history documentaries.

His response was: "One. Nobody is interested in history. Two. Nobody watches history programs. Three. Nobody wants to be lectured by a woman, especially a lovely, pretty woman like you."

"And then he put his hand on my knee," she says.

It was television from which Hughes's history passion arose - she recalls, aged only four, the epiphany of realising from a program on Tutankhamen that "princes and golden tombs were not fairy stories but reality".

And she sat down to write about Tutankhamen. Her first book, aged four. "Ever since, I have been totally in love with history and research," she says.

Her instinct for performance Hughes attributes to her father, actor Peter Hughes - "he's not famous but he crops up on screen a lot".

"My brother, Simon Hughes, was a cricketer for Middlesex and now does the cricket commentary," she says. "It is interesting that we both ended up being specialists and taking our specialties to television."

Hughes says she has "the perfect life" in being able to continue researching history, often in the landscape. She has just followed the footsteps of Helen of Troy through Turkey, Greece, Italy and Sicily.

"Sometimes I take my children on these trips," she adds.

Hughes is married to arts producer Adrian Evans, director of the Southbank Festival in London, and they have daughters Sorrel, 9, and May, 5. Her book on Helen of Troy has been 15 years in part-time research and, declares Bettany with incredulity, "it is the first book on Helen of Troy ever written".

It is deliberately light with short chapters because, "as a working mum", Hughes is very aware of the time constraints many have for the pleasure of reading. "You can read a chapter and go off and do the washing," she says. "As a woman, I know about multitasking."

She has been doing books tours and writers' events and on this, her first visit to Australia, she effuses with praise about how well organised is the Festival Writers' Week.

Hughes is not mixing in on the debates about Australian history at Writers' Week, but says she is most impressed by the way the event encourages debate and intelligent participation from audiences.

The Australians she met as a girl were all cricketers.

Discussing history's application to politics at Writers' Week, Hughes advised politicians of the moment that the best way to solve problems was "by looking at the problems of civilisations of the past".

"George Bush, with Iraq, had clearly never opened a history book because if he had, he would realise he had to treat the Middle East with foreknowledge. You simply cannot blunder in and expect it to work. If you look at a map, the boundaries in Europe are all wiggly. In the Middle East, they are straight lines because they are entirely a construct made by the British and the French. That is what you have to realise you are inheriting. All our great leaders should pay a lot more attention to the lessons of history.