You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

Great Lives is a download from Radio 4. We hope you enjoy what you're about to hear.

Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, sang about it.

So many of us will have visited it. Tourists come just to see it.

It's part of our country, part of London, part of what makes up our whole culture.

Every tinpot nation these days aims to have a national museum.

But we're centuries ahead. Whose idea was our British

Museum in the first place? A collector, the mother and father of all collectors

from a bronze goose elephant bones to a 350,000 year old

stone hand axe such was his obsession for collecting that he had to acquire the house next door

just to keep it all in,

a man of whom one later biographer commented,

there cannot have been many persons who dissected an elephant,

and when Handel is said to have visited, the composer outraged our great life because he placed

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