成人快手

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So last night was the launch of the official book of the series. I managed to snag a ticket to the event at the British Museum in which Neil MacGregor and Mark Damazer looked back at how the series happened and what they feel it managed to achieve.

As Neil put it: 鈥淣one of us can quite remember how it all began; there is a certain creation myth that has grown around it at the museum.鈥� Mark Damazer admitted that the germ of the project had appeared around five years ago 鈥� and I thought that just the last year had been exhausting.

There were some insights into the process at the museum that led to the selection of the objects. It seems that half the museum must have been involved in the decisions at some point.

Neil said the process involved himself and the three main series curators meeting up with at least five other 鈥渃urators of the week鈥�, who represented individual collections within the museum. Between them they would then thrash out 鈥渨hat theme you might choose around, say, the year 800 AD that would allow you to talk about objects from Europe, Asia, the Americas and the Middle East.鈥� (You can find out what they settled on here.)

What I took away from the evening is that the scale of the project and the decisions that arose from the central concept, that this had to be a world history, took even the museum team by surprise. Or, as Neil put it, 鈥淭he shock when we realised that the Roman Empire would have one object; the Renaissance would have one object.鈥�

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Those decisions led to a series that looks at cultures some of which I certainly knew little or nothing about. So it was gratifying to hear that the same had happened to the team behind it, including Neil:

I don鈥檛 know about your education but mine had very little about the Yemen in the early Christian era. It had simply never occurred to me to think: 鈥榳hat was happening in Yemen in 200-300AD?鈥�

Me neither, but now I have some idea thanks to the Arabian bronze hand that was chosen among the 100 objects. Similarly, I now know something about the Huastecs, the Indus civilisation and the Tang dynasty. It has been a very long journey of discovery.

And now it鈥檚 a book. The thing that struck me is the size of it; around 650 pages plus another 50 pages of bibliography, index, references, etc. Just the weight of it reminds you of the epic nature of the series.

Fortunately, just like the radio series, it鈥檚 in bite-sized chunks, so you can rest your arms every 400 years or so.

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