From Cleopatra to Elizabeth Taylor, women have found jewels irresistible

When workmen demolished an ancient building in Cheapside in 1912 they saw something glinting out of a broken wooden box. They had stumbled on what became known as the Cheapside Hoard – a collection of jewels dating from around 1600, its star, the Cheapside Emerald, a wonderful stone holding a miniature watch. It came from Colombia, still the source of the world’s finest emeralds, probably the world’s most ancient gems. The first recorded instance of them is on an Egyptian papyrus around 2400 BC. Their beauty and rarity made them the favourite of the élite, with Cleopatra probably their most famous fan. The Rockefeller Emerald fetched $5.5 million in 2017.

Helen Molesworth, now the senior jewellery curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, after years spent as a jewellery expert for Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses, and a lecturer on gemology at Geneva University, has produced a magnificent compendium of everything one could ever want to know about jewels: their symbolism, physical construction, worth and history. Gems such as the Koh-i-Noor, Hope and Wittelsbach-Graff Diamonds come with a comet-tail of legend and provenance.

Molesworth has visited almost every mine she writes about, sometimes with her students. There were hair-raising journeys on mountain roads to the emeralds of Bogota, and kidnapping risks on the way to the fabled ruby mines of Myanmar. Burmese rubies have a claim to be the world’s best: their depth of colour and almost fluorescent inner glow is what sets them apart, especially those from the fabled Mogok mine. ‘The ruby is a male gem,’ Molesworth writes, worn for centuries by rulers and historically associated with power, blood and fire.