Aye Write! reviews: Neil MacGregor | Robert Peston | David Donnison | Richard Holloway

Let’s go back 40,000 years. People – cavemen, we call them, though in many ways they were just like us – are sitting next to a fire in the hills of southern Germany. Between them, they are passing a small statue carved from the tusk of a woolly mammoth. What’s special about that object, says Neil MacGregor, is that it’s the earliest example of something created by man’s imagination. Not copied from nature but made up in his brain.