British Museum

Tasha and I were colleagues for a few years until she moved on to start a PhD on Roman metallurgy.

And although she hasn't quite finished that she's now back with the portable antiquities scheme as a roman coins advisor at the british museum and her research it's really fascinating analyzing the coins has suggested that we need to rethink some of our ideas about how the romans produced all kinds of metal work so i was really keen to invite her onto the podcast to tell you about it

I'm very excited to meet her.

So we will do that very, very soon.

And I don't see why we sort of need to record them so differently.

I mean, we record them as an imitation, but we can still tell you who's on the obverse and what they're potentially trying to copy on the reverse and record it in the same way as we do a coin, which is why I could come up as part of my research is also going to come up with a typology and a new way of recording these.

And now that I'm working with the British Museum, we've been lucky to be able to put in some new guidance for recording them and change the description to imitation rather than barfless radio, which is one of the first things I think I tried to do when I joined.

You're leading the campaign to do it, which is marvellous.

This has been a bestselling thriller.

It was voted Editor's Pick of the Week by the Daily Express and one of the five best religious thrillers of all time by bestthrillers.com. You have just handed your publisher a history of the British Museum.

which is, again, a super interesting time to be writing it when discussions of artefacts and where they should reside are polarised.

I watched a debate that you were in, you were part of, about the Elgin Marbles or the Parthenon sculptures.

You speak regularly about history in the media.

You appear regularly on television and radio as a historical commentator and advisor.

You speak at schools, universities, literary festivals, learning societies and institutions like the British Library and the British Museum.

You write articles regularly for all the top respected newspapers and magazines.

These social activities did not prevent her from keeping up with her studies.

She defied convention by investing in a bicycle on which she rode to the British Museum when she wanted to do serious reading.

Extracts from two letters written in 1892 show how easily she could change her mood and adapt herself to different atmospheres.

We spent a madly amusing five days in Canterbury, of which nothing remains to tell except that we danced every night, saw a good deal of cricket, and talked a little.

She employed native teachers in London, and by 1896 had read the Koran and much of the Arabian Nights in their original tongues.

But again, as at Oxford, that mixture of youthful enthusiasm for life and study remained.

In a letter from London she talks enthusiastically about a fancy dress ball and the costumes she wore, and then of spending the morning at the British Museum reading the life of Hafiz with a Latin crib.

She went to Italy and lived for some time in Venice where her first step was to learn Italian.

This has been a bestselling thriller.

It was voted Editor's Pick of the Week by the Daily Express and one of the five best religious thrillers of all time by bestthrillers.com. You have just handed your publisher a history of the British Museum.

which is, again, a super interesting time to be writing it when discussions of artefacts and where they should reside are polarised.

I watched a debate that you were in, you were part of, about the Elgin Marbles or the Parthenon sculptures.

You speak regularly about history in the media.

You appear regularly on television and radio as a historical commentator and advisor.

You speak at schools, universities, literary festivals, learning societies and institutions like the British Library and the British Museum.

You write articles regularly for all the top respected newspapers and magazines.

It's the year 1867.

A bearded philosopher named Karl Marx sits in the dim light of the British Museum scribbling the foundational texts of Das Kapital.

He is writing about a terrifying future where every human interaction is reduced to a cold transaction.

A world where even kindness is a commodity bought and sold for a profit.

Thank you for watching Lato's Law.

Why are the pyramids in Egypt? Because they were too heavy to carry to the British Museum.

How exciting.

I'm trying to explain this to my teenage children and they just give me this look that just made me feel like, you know, I was behind glass in the British Museum or something.

You do fossil.

What are you talking about? But it was really interesting to look at these photos because my memory of these photos in the box, in the bag, is that they were beautifully framed and in focus and get the photos out and they're wonky and everyone's got terrible red eye.

get that far.

Well, I don't know about you, Frankie, but if it's behind the Sphinx's ear, knowing humanity, that thing that's going to save humanity is in the British Museum.

That's an imperialism joke.

Thank you very much.

Yeah.

For those unfamiliar, the British, when they colonized or conquered different parts of the world, took a whole bunch of stuff back with them to Britain and put it in the British Museum.

I'm sure my disgust is shining through.

I just can't, like, call me Fox Mulder because I want to believe, but I cannot believe this.