There are few books in any field of the arts or sciences - and not least in the one in which I work, that of culture, galleries and museums - that have become outdated faster than Neil MacGregor's hugely successful A. History of the World in 100 Objects. Published to great acclaim in 2010, across more than six hundred pages, the text was a kind of handbook to a BBC Radio series of the same name, in which the former director of the British Museum discussed 100 archaeological, ethnographic and historical objects distilled from the more than eight million other artefacts that came to form the museum's collection over the two and a half centuries since its foundation in 1753, drawn from two million years of the human past. Why is it, just 13 years on, that MacGregor's book feels so out of step with our times? How has the softly-spoken nature of its dominant authorial voice - the lone, white, British, male, Blairite cultural bureaucrat who condenses the observations of scores of expert curators for a global readership in a style reminiscent of the relentless cuteness of Ernst Gombrich's bestselling A Little History of the World (posthumously published in a revised English form five years before MacGregor's book) - come to sound so shrill?
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