Author:Neil MacGregor
In 2010, the BBC and the British Museum embarked on an ambitious project: to tell the story of two million years of human history using one hundred objects selected from the Museum's vast and renowned collection. Presented by the British Museum's Director Neil MacGregor, each episode focuses on a single object - from a Stone Age tool to a solar-powered lamp - and explains its significance in human history. Music, interviews with specialists and quotations from written texts enrich the listener's experience. On each CD, objects from a similar period of history are grouped together to explore a common theme and make connections across the world. Seen in this way, history is a kaleidoscope: shifting, interlinked, constantly surprising and shaping our world in ways that most of us have never imagined. This box set also includes an illustrated booklet with additional background information and photographs, and each CD includes PDF images of the featured objects.
20 CDs. 25 hrs.
a broadcasting phenomenon
—— Maev Kennedy , The Guardianperfect radio
—— Philip Hensher , The Independentdeserves to take its place alongside television classics such as Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man.
—— Dominic Sandbrook , The TelegraphA work of magisterial ambition and achievement...He has taken a great subject and transformed it.
—— Blair Worden , London Review of BooksSattin has written a brilliantly assured experiment in biography, a triumph of the historical imagination. Convincingly researched, informed by an unobtrusive first-hand knowledge of Egyptian places, compellingly skilful in the writing, the whole story is illuminated by Anthony Sattin's delicately perceptive sense of character in action.
—— Literary ReviewRemarkable
—— ScotsmanSattin's account is authoritative, thoroughly researched and pacy . . . this book is a treat.
—— Time OutElegant and absorbing, A Winter On The Nile sheds fresh light upon two titans of the age
—— Tim Butcher, author of BLOOD RIVERBeguiling and impressively researched ... A compelling snapshot of two of the most celebrated figures of the age, before their fame, and of a time when travel was leisurely and scholarly. And it sings with the romance of Egypt
—— Traveller MagazineIf this doesn't win a major book prize, I will eat my sola topi ... Beautifully counterpoints the spiritual travel experiences of the soon-to-be-famous nurse fleeing an arranged marriage, with the much more lubricious ones of the then-unpublished novelist.
—— Giles Foden , Conde Nast TravellerIn 1849, Florence Nightingale and author Gustave Flaubert visited Egypt. Anthony Sattin's book recreates the transformative steps towards fame these two took as they simultaneously travelled around Egypt
—— BBC Lonely Planet magazineA fascinating biography
—— Lesley McDowell , HeraldThis book is excellent
—— Andrew Holgate , Sunday TimesThis dramatic biography recreates her tragic life and the turbulent times in which she lived...Nemirovsky is one of those rare writers whose life is every bit as interesting as her work
—— Simon Shaw , Mail on SundayThis is a scholarly biography of a literary paragon... It is saturated with her writings, revealing her passions, hubris, moods and anxieties, as well as her thoughts of fiction, Jewishness and mothers... Russian social history, anti-Semitism and the Vichy regime's collusion with the Nazis are handled adroitly
—— Maggie Armstrong , Irish TimesAn epic novel... The suspense lasts until the final pages. There is no let-up. At the end of the book, you really feel that even though Sashenka is a fictional character, she has become one of the thousands of real people who haunt the Moscow archives that Montefiore knows so well
—— SUNDAY EXPRESS