The jaw-dropping story of the British Museum thefts

It’s August 2023 when news breaks that artefacts have gone missing, presumed stolen, from the British Museum. I’m about an hour into investigating the story for a feature when a suspect is named in the press. I know him. He’s the curator I was seated next to at a British Museum dinner nine months earlier.

Listening this week to three preview episodes of Thief at the British Museum, an electrifying nine-part series on Radio 4, I kick myself for the second time for spending most of that evening talking to the professor on my left. What can I remember of the man on my right? He was quiet. Ruddy-faced. Nothing else remarkable springs to mind.

The British Museum has launched legal proceedings against curator Peter Higgs, who was dismissed from his curatorial post pending the investigation. The path that led them to his name, as described in the new series, is one of the most extraordinary you are likely to hear, but not because it is convoluted – quite the contrary.

We follow that trail through the accounts of Danish gem specialist and dealer Ittai Gradel. He is, quotes presenter Katie Razzall, ‘the museum world’s answer to Sherlock Holmes’. This Danish Holmes is a gem-obsessed ‘outsider’ with a photographic memory. He left academia because he couldn’t bear sitting at the same desk and seeing the same colleagues ‘every bloody day’. One former colleague describes him as ‘quite a character’. His resemblance to Benedict Cumberbatch’s Holmes is hammed up across the episodes to an irritating degree.

Gradel happened upon the trail unwittingly. In 2010, one of his friends, a fellow antiquities dealer, came by a new supplier who purported to be an elderly man named Paul Higgins. Gradel purchased many items from his collection happily enough until some background research revealed there was no man matching his profile in public records.