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of years ago, but its gilded inside tells of a later, aestheticizing Japan, conscious now of its own particular traditions, revisiting and honouring its long history: the object has become a commentary on itself. The African wooden slit drum (Chapter 94) is an even more remarkable example of an object’s many lives. Made in the shape of a calf for a ruler probably in the northern Congo, it was re-branded as an Islamic object in Khartoum, and then, captured by Lord Kitchener, carved with Queen Victoria’s crown and sent to Windsor – a wooden narrative of conquests and empires. I do not think any text could combine so many histories of Africa and Europe, nor make them so powerfully immediate. This is a history only a thing can tell.

Two objects in the book are disconcertingly material tales of changed allegiances and of structures that failed, showing two different faces to two very different worlds. From the front, Hoa Hakananai’a (Chapter 70) proclaims with unshakable confidence the potency of ancestors who, properly venerated, will keep Easter Island safe. On his back, however, is sculpted the failure of that very cult and its later, anxious replacement by other rituals as the Easter Island ecosystem broke down and the birds essential to life on the island moved away. The religious history of a community, lived out over centuries, is all legible in this one statue. The Russian Revolutionary plate (Chapter 96), by contrast, shows changes that were very much the consequence of human choice – and political calculation. The use of imperial porcelain to carry Bolshevik imagery has a beguiling irony about it; but that is rapidly overtaken by admiration for the unsentimental commercial brilliance which guessed correctly that capitalist collectors in the West would pay more for a plate if it combined the hammer and sickle of the Revolution with the imperial monogram of the Tsar. The plate shows the first steps in the complex historic compromise between the Soviets and the liberal democracies which would continue for the next seventy years.

These two reworkings both fascinate and instruct, but the refashioning which gives me the most pleasure is without doubt the Admonitions Scroll (Chapter 39). For hundreds of years, as it was slowly unrolled before them, owners and connoisseurs have taken delight in this celebrated masterpiece of Chinese painting, and have then recorded it by marking it with their seals. The result may alarm a western eye used to regarding the work of art as an almost sacred space, but there is I think something very moving about these acts of aesthetic witness which create a community of shared enjoyment spanning the centuries, and to which we in our turn may be admitted – even if we do not add our seals. There could be no clearer statement that this beautiful thing, which has charmed people in different ways over such a very long time, still has the power to delight and is now ours to enjoy.

There is another way in which the biographies of things change over time. One of the key tasks of museum scholarship, and above all of museum conservation science, is to keep returning to our objects, as new technologies allow us to ask new questions of them. The results, in recent years especially, have frequently been astonishing, opening up fresh lines of investigation and discovering unsuspected meanings in what we thought were familiar things. At the moment, objects are changing fast. The most striking instance in this book is surely the jade axe from Canterbury (Chapter 14), whose origin we can now trace to the very boulder from which it was originally chipped, high on a mountain in northern Italy. In consequence we have a new understanding of the trade routes of early Europe and a fresh set of hypotheses about the significance of the axe itself, especially valued, perhaps, because it came from above the clouds and far away. New methods of medical examination allow us intimate knowledge of the ailments of the ancient Egyptians (Chapter 1) and of the talismans they took with them into the afterlife. The medieval Hedwig