Michael Lewis
speaker
310 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2026
last heard 8 Sep
Michael Lewis’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Oh my gosh, there's a bit of a backstory here.
I'll try and keep it as quick as possible.
So in 2013, I was asked to join the Bayer Tapestry Scientific Committee, which was advising Bayer Museum on how the tapestry was going to be displayed and reinterpreted in its new museum.
and it came clear quite soon really that the museum would have to close for them to do their ambitious plans for the museum which involved putting the tapestry in a single straight line and it occurred to me kind of obviously really that this would be an opportunity if the tapestry is coming off display and going to be put in storage for several years for it to come to the uk and of course i kind of mentioned that to my colleagues mostly french colleagues
And they basically said to me, Michael, this is a lovely idea, but I don't really see how this is going to happen because the tapestry is obviously, as you know, kind of very fragile, very delicate.
But it's a nice idea.
But over time, it sort of got a bit of traction, essentially because I was starting to talk to all sorts of different people about the kind of possibility of this.
I kind of didn't let it rest in a way.
And there was conversations I was having with colleagues at the DCMS in advance of this summit.
It's called the Sandhurst Summit in 2018 between Macron and May.
And different departments within government kind of normally offer things towards that summit.
And there had been the idea that this loan request could be part of that.
And I was kind of knowing things from both sides because my colleagues in Bayer Museum were telling me to say, look, we've been asked about this and whether it would be possible and et cetera, et cetera.
And obviously they'd known I'd be very interested in this for a long time.
So it sort of became essentially part of the agreement that if the tapestry was safe to travel, then it would be loaned to the UK.
And of course, President Macron famously announced that just before the summit and it splashed off over the...
newspapers, that the bear tapestry was coming to the UK, but it wasn't quite a done deal.
And in fact, I think from my perspective, it was a little bit frustrating that on the British side, there wasn't a real clear plan about how that would sort of happen.
Still, I'd kind of badgered about it, you know, knowing this was an agreement in principle.
I got this sort of tip off from the British embassy in Paris that in 2025, the French foreign minister was kind of intrigued about this idea.
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