The Queen Mother's jewelry collection was extensive, with many pieces passed down to Queen Elizabeth II and later worn by other members of the royal family, including Camilla, the Queen Consort. Some of her most well-known jewels include the Greville Tiara and Earrings, which she inherited from Margaret Greville. Other notable pieces include brooches like the Sapphire and Diamond Grapes Brooch and the Diamond Thistle Brooch. 

The lecturer on leaving Durham University with a degree in geology decided to join the Army.He then spent five years in the Irish Guards, the last two and a half of which were on secondment to Clarence House as the Queen Mother’s equerry. Being a geologist he admired  the magnificent gemstones in the Queen Mother’s jewellery. Indeed if he admired a piece she would sometimes take it off and give it to him to have a closer look. He qualified as a Fellow of the Gemmological Association. Then, in addition to working as an exploration geologist in South Africa and a gold miner in California,  spent several years as a jewellery and precious stone dealer in London’s Hatton Garden.

Hogarth was born in the City of London into a lower-middle-class family. In his youth he took up an apprenticeship with an engraver, but did not complete the apprenticeship. His father underwent periods of mixed fortune, and was at one time imprisoned in lieu of payment of outstanding debts, an event that is thought to have informed William's paintings and prints with a hard edge.

Influenced by French and Italian painting and engraving,Hogarth's works are mostly satirical caricatures, sometimes bawdily sexual,mostly of the first rank of realistic portraiture. They became widely popular and mass-produced via prints in his lifetime, and he was by far the most significant English artist of his generation. Charles Lamb deemed Hogarth's images to be books, filled with "the teeming, fruitful, suggestive meaning of words. Other pictures we look at; his pictures we read."

This lecture tells the stories in “The Harlot’s Progress”, the Rake’s Progress” and “Marriage-a-la-Mode” and shows how Hogarth was an artist with a social conscience and keen sense of humour

Charles Saatchi is an Iraqi-British businessman and the co-founder, with his brother Maurice, of advertising agency Saatchi & Saatchi. The brothers led the business, the world's largest advertising agency in the 1980s, until they left the agency in 1995. Born: 9 June 1943 (age 82 years), Baghdad, Iraq

Founding the Saatchi Gallery in 1985 – which now registers over 1.5 million visitors a year – is of course just one side to the story. In addition to his art ventures, the now-multimillionaire created an advertising empire which grew to become the largest in the world in the space of a few years. And through it Saatchi extended his influence yet further, creating original campaigns that went down in history and helped shape the future of the advertising world.

The "Winter Queen of Prague" refers to Elizabeth Stuart (1596–1662), daughter of England's King James I, who briefly reigned as Queen of Bohemia with her husband, Frederick V, Elector Palatine, from 1619 to 1620, enduring only one winter before being deposed, sparking the Thirty Years' War, and spending the rest of her life in exile, though her lineage eventually led to the Hanoverian succession in Britain. Elizabeth Stuart was also known as Elizabeth of Bohemia.

Broadcaster and lecturer Leslie Primo expertly places art history in the wider political contexts of xenophobia and influence, addressing both foreign artists working in Britain and British-born artists affected by foreign cultures. From Hans Holbein to Artemisia Gentileschi, from William Hogarth to Angelica Kauffman, familiar masters and lesser-known creators are situated within the multiculturalism inherent to, yet commonly dismissed by, the art world at this time.

Weaving together artists’ experiences of both acclaim and adversity, The Foreign Invention of British Art not only demonstrates how immigration and diversification are so often the driving force behind creative innovation but also reveals the true heritage behind some of the nation’s defining artworks.