Non-fiction: History
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The Mildenhall Treasure is a collection of thirty-four silver objects found in a field in Suffolk in the 1940’s. This Object in Focus book by Richard Hobbs tells the story of its discovery. There was some controversy over who found what and exactly where, as well the delay in declaring the find under Treasure Trove…
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One of the current exhibitions at the British Museum is Luxury and Power: Persia to Greece and as always, there is an exhibition catalogue which is written by James Fraser, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones and Henry Cosmo Bishop-Wright. As with all BM catalogues, it is so much more than that. There are beautiful photos of the objects…
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I’ve never paid much attention to the Lewis Chessmen, despite their prominence in British Museum gift shops. However, one of my reading quests is to read all the books in the Objects in Focus series, so here we are. The Lewis Chessmen, by James Robinson, takes an in-depth look at both the chessmen themselves and…
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There were two exhibitions just starting at the British Museum in March 2020 when the UK went into its first lockdown in response to Covid-19. One was Tantra and I read the exhibition guide for that last year. The other was Arctic Culture and Climate. The circumpolar North has been inhabited for nearly 30,000 years.…
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Over the last year I’ve read several books from the British Museum’s Objects in Focus series. These are lovely little books that provide a bitesize history of significant objects in the Museum’s collection, often with interesting contextual information from when the object was created and when it was discovered. There’s also often information about conservation…
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Published in 2002 to mark the 250th anniversary (in 2003) of the British Museum, The British Museum, A History is a history of the institution told by a former Director of the Museum, David M. Wilson. Much of the focus of the book is on the first 150 years from the origins of the collection…
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There will be a British Museum theme to most of the next few posts. Tantra by Dr Imma Ramos is the book of the British Museum exhibition on Tantra. It had just opened in early 2020 when the pandemic hit and so I didn’t get to see the exhibition itself. The book and exhibition tell…
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Welcome to my annual flurry of posts about books, where I realise I haven’t posted anything in months, have a few weeks of activity, and then get distracted by work and life again. Anyway, recently I went to the World of Stonehenge exhibition at the British Museum and, as I do, I bought a book.…
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I started reading Crisis by Henry Kissinger as Covid-19 lockdown started in the UK. It seemed… appropriate, given that it’s a record of a group of people trying to respond to a situation that is changing on a daily basis with limited information. Crisis covers the Yom Kippur war and the last days of the…
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Misha Glenny’s The Balkans has been my breakfast book for the last year. Breakfast books are the many large, heavy books I have on my shelf that I can’t commute with so they get read in twenty minutes stints while I have breakfast. Sometimes twenty minutes is enough time to read a reasonable chunk. Other…
Boudica Marginalia 