Telling our story

• Text settings

  Text size

  • Small
  • Medium
  • Large

  Line Spacing

  • Compact
  • Normal
  • Spacious
• Comments
• Share

  Share

  Kate Chisholm

  Telling our story

  Copy link

  • Linkedin
  • Messenger
  • Email

Already a subscriber? Log in

This article is for subscribers only

Subscribe today to get 3 months' delivery of the magazine, as well as online and app access, for only £3.

• Weekly delivery of the magazine
• Unlimited access to our website and app
• Enjoy Spectator newsletters and podcasts
• Explore our online archive, going back to 1828

Most popular

Alexander Larman

What happened to the Rishi Sunak I knew at school?

You can imagine TV producers throwing up their hands in horror at such limitations of time, location and medium. How can you hope to draw the audience in with so little to attract them? But it’s the very economy of the enterprise that fills the mind with wonder. Each programme lasts for fewer than 15 minutes, yet covers great swathes of history and huge chasms of thought.

MacGregor confides in us that the greatest benefit of being museum director is the opportunity occasionally to handle some of the rarest items in the collection. He picks up and holds in his hands a stone hand axe from the Olduvai gorge in the great African rift valley — ‘a piece of grey- green volcanic rock, very beautiful. It’s the shape of a teardrop’. What more do you need to imagine exactly what he’s talking about?

‘How closely it matches the shape of a human hand,’ he remarks as he turns it over in his hands, observing the marks of the original carver, 1.2 million years ago. A stonemason joins him in the museum to show him how a lump of rock can be turned in just 10–15 minutes into a tool that can kill an animal, strip bark from a tree, butcher an elephant. It requires manual dexterity, but also a conceptual leap — the sculptor’s ability to imagine in a lump of rock the shape you want to make. ‘If you can shape a rock in this way,’ says MacGregor, ‘then you can shape a sentence.’

Each episode ends with almost a minute of specially composed music, peaceful, soothing, like the relaxation at the end of a yoga session. It allows us to think back over what we’ve just heard, to absorb the huge ideas encapsulated in these objects, to imprint the pictures they make in the mind so that we never forget the story behind the swimming reindeer, carved out of a mammoth’s tusk at the end of the last Ice Age with the knowledge of a hunter and the insight of a butcher. It was made for no practical function but just from a delight in the natural world, and the desire, says Rowan Williams, ‘to be part of that flow of life’.