Hello and welcome to our monthly series History Behind the Headlines. I'm Matt Elton.

In each episode, an expert panel will be exploring the historical news stories that have caught their eye and the history that will help you make sense of what's going on in the world.

Each month, I'll be joined by our two regular panelists.

I'm Hannah Skoda, I'm Fellow and Tudor in

medieval history at St John's College in Oxford. I'm Rana Mitter. I'm St. Lee Chair in US-Asia

Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School and I'm a specialist on modern Chinese history.

Hannah and Rana, thank you both so much as always for being here with us. We're going to start

this month with the big news announced earlier in July that the Bayer Tapestry is set to return to the UK for the first time in more than 900 years and we'll go on display at the British Museum in London next year. To help us understand more about why this is such big news and a bit about the longer history of the politics of it at all. I'm delighted to say that we're

joined by Dr Dave Musgrove, whose content director of History Extra and the History Extra podcast

and the co-author with Michael Lewis of the story of the Bayer Tapestry unraveling the Norman

conquest. Dave, to kick us off, why is this such exciting news? Well, this is the biggest news

in the history world. Biggest news

in my career, and particularly because I've written this book, it's very exciting. So let me recap

where we are. So the bear tapestry is going to be loaned to the UK by France, as you said.

The loan was first announced in 2018, and by my count, that's seven years, five prime

ministers and one pandemic ago. I was super excited about the

initial low news in 2018. I leapt in and co-wrote that book. And since then, I have been

waiting impatiently for something to happen. There's a press officer in the Department of

Culture Media and Sport who is probably very bored with me regularly emailing her for progress.

Nothing to report was the regular

reply. But actually, here on History Extra, we did have an inkling that something was afoot, because

we had a few minutes with the British Prime Minister, Keir Stama, in May, this year at the time

...