I’ve been like a kid in a candy story, I’ve had all the treasures before me, and I’ve picked out a few objects, a few paintings, a few things, to talk about and explain why I found them so fascinating.

What’s so interesting about this for a history geek like me is that Daniel Maclise went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his work would be super accurate. Because of course, there were people still alive who’d been there.

The point of Dazzle was to use colour and shape in an abstract way, to try and confuse German U-boat commanders. This shows the various designs they’d fixed upon, working out what was the most distracting pattern.

What strikes you in this pastel portrait, as always when you look at fantastic depictions of people from whatever period, is how real and how human he seems, even though he’s now long dead.

There are all sorts of details you can see in this painting that aren’t now in Leonardo’s original – you can see the feet of Jesus, which you can’t see in the original because someone put a door in that wall.

What I love about the Herakles story is that he is the victim of fate, he is the victim of appalling injustice, and yet through courage and wisdom and wit, and with enormous patience, he keeps going and completes his labours.

JMW Turner’s art is so magisterial, but then here’s this fishing rod, and I feel connected for the first time to Turner as a person, with hobbies and frailties and the desire to go and spend all day on the riverbank.

My mum and dad had lots of prints by David Roberts on the wall of our house, so this reminds me of my childhood and the sense of adventure, the sense of a world out there to be explored.

Reynolds and Gainsborough had been fierce competitors in life, and yet at the very end, the person Gainsborough wanted to come and look at one of his pieces of art that he was proudest of, the person he wanted to converse with, was his fellow artist.