The Ice Age carving of two swimming reindeer as seen from above, which is one of the most remarkable things about it it seems to me; the unusual perspective is beautifully rendered. The piece was made 13,000 years ago from the slightly curved end of a mammoth tusk. One of the moment when my mind changed while reading was in the discussion here of ancient maritime links, so important since before fossil fuels water was much the easiest way to transport people and goods. In the so-called Dark Ages after the Romans left Britain, sophisticated trading relationships between Britain and the Scandinavian world probably became more important. To people on the north east coast, Danish and Norwegian people were neighbours, while folks living in Devon or Dorset were a world away. Similarly, favourable trade winds in the Indian Ocean made eastern Africa and most of Asia a vast, cosmopolitan trading community, as illustrated by a collection of pot sherds from a beach in Tanzania with pieces from China and the Muslim world amongst locally made ware For me, the most fascinating thing about this book was not the stories told by the objects, but what they left unsaid: I found myself musing about the people, long dead and gone, who must have handled these objects, many a time little knowing they would they would be enshrined and viewed by millions. For example, look at the Kilwa pot sherds (Chapter 60) from Tanzania: the housewife or maid who handled them- what might have they been like? What were they thinking as they washed, dried and cooked in these utensils? What would have gone through their minds when they finally threw them away? And (most importantly) the ordinary objects we throw away now – will they carry a similar message in a museum in, say, the year 2500? One thing MacGregor does often is highlight ethnocentric elitism. Here he is agreeably unpleasant about snobbish Mediterranean attitudes towards the 'Celts' (named thus by the Greeks) who were, I guess, the archetypal barbarians (the word the Greeks used for non-Greeks), but made objects like these unutterably beautiful flagons. He also talks here about the problems of understanding the Celtic lineage through the ancient Greek stereotype and equally misleading, much later British one. "the challenge... is how to get past those distorting mists of nationalist myth-making and let the objects speak as clearly as possible about their own place and their own distant world." Quite.

From the author of The History of the World in 100 Animals, a BBC Radio Four Book of the Week, comes an inspirational new book that looks at the 100 plants that have had the greatest impact on humanity, stunningly illustrated throughout. It is mentioned that sometimes only objects can tell about the people, since there was no writing, or the written texts were on a material that couldn't stand the wear of time (the climate, the place, the robbers and so on). One of the objects I have as a museum souvenir (the Rosetta Stone) - a paperweight. Neil MacGregor does sometimes fail to transcend British cultural myopia. A Native American pipe gets described (on p.235) as similar in size and shape to a "bourbon biscuit"—whatever that is. Other references to football pitches and sheets of A3 paper are more translatable, if no less Anglocentric. Setting aside the literal insularity of its viewpoint, though, A History of the World in 100 Objects is a truly amazing compendium.Just in case anyone fancies a taster, or to give you a flavour of the things described, my favourite objects were: Plants give us food. Plants take in carbon dioxide and push out oxygen: they give us the air we breathe, direct the rain that falls and moderate the climate. Plants also give us shelter, beauty, comfort, meaning, buildings, boats, containers, musical instruments, medicines and religious symbols. The book is organized into 20 sections of 5 objects. Those 20 sections are arranged chronologically, but more interestingly, a common theme for each section ties the objects together. So for example, section 1 is titled “Making us Human” and the 5 objects are: 1.) Mummy of Hornedjitef; 2.) Olduvai Stone Chipping Tool; 3.) Olduvai Handaxe; 4.) Swimming Reindeer; and 5.) Clovis Spear Point. Each section is organized similarly.

As humans, we hold the planet in the palms of ours hands. But we still consume the energy of the sun in the form of food. The sun is available for consumption because of plants. Plants make food from the sun by the process of photosynthesis; nothing else in the world can do this. We eat plants, or we do so at second hand, by eating the eaters of plants. Plants give us food. Plants take in carbon dioxide and push out oxygen: they give us the air we breathe, direct the rain that falls and moderate the climate. Plants also give us shelter, beauty, comfort, meaning, buildings, boats, containers, musical instruments, medicines and religious symbols. We use flowers for love, we use flowers for death. Neil MacGregor was born in Glasgow to two doctors, Alexander and Anna MacGregor. At the age of nine, he first saw Salvador Dalí's Christ of Saint John of the Cross, newly acquired by Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery, which had a profound effect on him and sparked his lifelong interest in art. MacGregor was educated at Glasgow Academy and then read modern languages at New College, Oxford, where he is now an honorary fellow. The period that followed was spent studying philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris (coinciding with the events of May 1968), and as a law student at Edinburgh University, where he received the Green Prize. Despite being called to the bar in 1972, MacGregor next decided to take an art history degree. The following year, on a Courtauld Institute (University of London) summer school in Bavaria, the Courtauld's director Anthony Blunt spotted MacGregor and persuaded him to take a master's degree under his supervision. Blunt later considered MacGregor "the most brilliant pupil he ever taught".

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Plants make food from the sun by the process of photosynthesis; nothing else in the world can do this. That is what one has to do while reading this book. Let the imagination roam free across space and time: as MacGregor describes the object, puts it in its historical context, and pulls in experts from various fields like art, literature, history etc. to give their opinions on it, the mind of the reader is engaged in a continuous dialogue with history. As we trace mankind’s origins from the Olduvai gorge in Africa to the interconnected modern world, the sense of linear time slowly disappears history starts looking like a geography of time.

The first gun was a plant, we got fire from plants, we have enslaved people for the sake of plants.  We humans like to see ourselves as a species that has risen above the animal kingdom, doing what we will with the world. There are some peculiar things about our copy of this book. Its owner has underlined and marked a few passages, some with a graphite pencil and some with a type of marker called a highlighter (which left a bright streak of color without obscuring the text). This was a common practice at the time: readers marked passages that they liked or that they needed to memorize or use in some way, since otherwise it could be difficult to find it among such a mountain of text (all of which, you will recall, is composed of the same handful of symbols in various combinations, which took years of training to decode). During a stay in London, I decided to follow the path of the objects in the British Museum as well, and having learned more about the way they entered the famous museum made them all the more precious. We use flowers for love, we use flowers for death. The fossils of plants power our industries and our transport. Plants give us food. Plants take in carbon dioxide and push out oxygen: they give us the air we breathe, direct the rain that falls and moderate the climate. Plants also give us shelter, beauty, comfort, meaning, buildings, boats, containers, musical instruments, medicines and religious symbols. We use flowers for love, we use flowers for death. The fossils of plants power our industries and our transport. Across history we have used plants to store knowledge, to kill, to fuel wars, to change our state of consciousness, to indicate our status. The first gun was a plant, we got fire from plants, we have enslaved people for the sake of plants.

Table of Contents

I love this book. I got it from my dear friend Dean, who is a museum professional, as a gift last Christmas. The reading of it has lasted me the entire year and has been a source of continual wonder. It consists of a series of short essays on 100 objects chosen by the director of the British Museum to tell the story of the history of the world. The objects are beautiful, inspiring, ingenious, inventive, compelling, challenging, complex, profound. I kept the book by my bedside. Sometimes I would read several essays in a row. But more often my reading was more spaced out because a single essay could set off a chain-reaction (like the entry on the Standard of Ur, which led me to read Sir Charles Leonard Woolley's first-hand account of his fabulous archeological discoveries in the ancient Sumerian city in the mid-1930s). I spent hours researching the objects on the Internet, looking at images, looking at maps.