The British Museum Press

One of the best known and simultaneously most notorious figures from Roman history, Nero (r. AD 54 68) is usually characterised as a tyrannical and ineffectual emperor, a ruler who proverbially fiddled while Rome burnt'. However, as new research demonstrates, this reputation is crudely reductive (...)

Katsushika Hokusai (1760 1849) is considered by many to be Japan's greatest artist. During his seventy-year career, he produced a considerable oeuvre of some 3,000 color prints, illustrations for over 200 books, hundreds of drawings, and over 1,000 paintings. This exciting collection of 103 (...)

Exposición British Museum 18/05/23 - 08/10/23.Cultural creativity in China between 1796 and 1912 demonstrated extraordinary resilience in a time of warfare, land shortages, famine and uprisings. Innovation can be seen in material culture (including print, painting, calligraphy, textiles, fashion, (...)

Luxurious objects are celebrated for their exoticism, rarity and style, but also disparaged as indulgent, extravagant and corrupt. The ancient origins of these attitudes emerged at the boundary between the imperial Persian and democratic Athenian Greek worlds. Luxury was at the centre of the royal (...)