Dorothy Armstrong talks to Oliver Soden

Historian and expert in carpets Dr Dorothy Armstrong looks at the history of the world through the stories of a dozen carpets from those in the tombs of 5th-century BCE Scythian chieftains to those walked on in Yalta by the boots of Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt.

Armstrong says great carpets follow power. Emperors, sultans, shahs and samurai craved them as symbols of earthly domination. However, they were usually made by poor and illit-erate weavers using the most basic of materials. Armstrong explores how some of the great carpets were made, how they travelled the globe in the footsteps of the great and how the lives of those who made them were affected by world events.

Armstrong is a historian of the material culture of South, Central and West Asia and has lec-tured widely on carpets. She was Beattie Fellow in Carpet Studies at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford and is currently an honorary research assistant in the museum’s Eastern art department. Here she talks to writer and broadcaster Oliver Soden, author of Michael Tippett: The Biography, Jeoffry: The Poet’s Cat, and Masquerade: The Lives of Noël Coward.