My guest today is Dr. Tyna Cooper who is curation and conservation director at the National

Trust and she was formerly curator of 16th century collections at the National Portrait

Gallery. She was very much our sort of woman. She is an author several times over and her

most recent book is 125 treasures from the collections of the National Trust. It's a

gorgeous little book. It's just come out. It would make the most wonderful gift. And

as you know I take the playing field of not just the tutors to be anywhere from the late

15th to the late 17th century. So I asked Dr. Cooper if she would speak to us about a dozen

treasures from her book that date from this period. And that is the rather wonderful task

that we have ahead of us today. But before we get into that, Tyna, how did you choose

125 treasures from everything that the National Trust has? It must have been an excruciating

process. What were your criteria? We were really wrestling with lots of different things

because I wanted to show the extraordinary range of objects that there are in the trust,

you know, everything from tapestries and paintings and sculpture to armour, to dress, to furniture,

to ceramics, fast numbers of different things. But we also wanted to show some of the key

treasure houses present their collections across the whole of the National Trust. So we're

thinking about the regional variation and ensure that we could across time have enough

objects that were really represented a particular period. So partly because my background is

16th and 17th century, there are quite a lot of 16th and 17th century things in the book,

but there are certainly Roman objects, there are 18th century things and there are 20th century

things too. And the interesting thing about the National

Trust collections is that unlike a museum's collection, they are in some cases in the situation

in which they were used and they are in their historic places and they haven't been imported

...