WHEN the novelist H G Wells wrote his history of the world, he kept it short. The writer Julian Barnes’s humorous attempt at the same subject was contained in a mere 10½ chapters.

But there will be no such brevity in the latest attempt to chronicle human history. The British Museum and its director, Neil MacGregor, are planning to tell the story of civilisation in 100 episodes.

The series, to be broadcast on BBC Radio 4, is the brainchild of Mark Damazer, the network’s controller, a history buff who realised that the British Museum and its 7m objects were the ideal place to base a story of mankind.

“It will be a history of human society from the whole world, told through 100 of our objects,” said MacGregor, who will narrate the series.

“Not the history of the world, but a history that you can tell from objects because they themselves are about society and peoples.”

In the programmes, each lasting 15 minutes, MacGregor will describe objects, talk to curators and experts and use music, poetry or prose to move the story along.

It is likely to begin with the Olduvai axes, which are 1.8m years old and come from Tanzania, where is it widely accepted that man first lived. “They are the evidence of man’s first beginnings,” said MacGregor.

The programmes will feature some of the museum’s most significant objects such as the Rosetta Stone from Egypt, an Easter Island statue, the Townley Vase and the 7th-century Sutton Hoo helmet found in Suffolk in 1939.

Pieces of eight coins will also be used to tell the story of how silver flooded in from the New World and to illustrate the role that coins played in creating a globalised economy.

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