This is why the Elgin Marbles are not going back. With characteristic panache, Neil MacGregor is once again making the case for the British Museum as a museum of all mankind. In 100 episodes based around 100 objects from the Bloomsbury collection, Mr MacGregor aims to cement the British Museum’s Enlightenment credentials. And he’s doing so with some ambitious inter-disciplinary thinking.

To tell a story of the world in 15 minutes through a series of objects requires a sure grasp of cultural and social anthropology. Mr MacGregor, whose most celebrated exhibition during his tenure at the National Gallery was the Seeing Salvation display of Renaissance iconography, has long understood the allure of artefacts. Indeed, he is sometimes accused of seeking to blur — in an increasingly agnostic age — the boundaries between the secular and the religious by investing the British Museum’s objects with an almost spiritual significance. But in going beyond the obviously material, in explaining the broader cultural and social currency of the collection, he will give the story of these objects a relevance far in excess of their historic context.

As such, he will draw on the work of the Cambridge anthropologist Alan Macfarlane whose books The Empire of Tea and Glass: A World History have used specific objects and foodstuffs to explore the grander themes of modernity, globalisation and cultural exchange. MacGregor’s list — from the Benin Bronzes to the credit card — provides similar such opportunities to leap from local to global. And knowing Mr MacGregor, he will not shy away from the kind of popular touch that the author Mark Kurlansky brought to this approach with his book Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World.

What he hopes to explain is how the British Museum’s collection — from the Rosetta Stone to the Elgin Marbles — changed world history. This is not Kenneth Clark’s consciously Eurocentric Civilisation or Radio 4’s Anglo-centric This Sceptred Isle, but a fiercely cosmopolitan project which mixes social history with art history, the power of ideas with economic realities.
Of course, the series has its dangers: analysing ethnology and faithfully explaining the practices of our forebears is difficult to sum up in 15 minutes. But such academic adventurism is exactly what Hans Sloane thought that the British Museum should be about, and it is hard to think of a more Reithian project for the BBC. Whether the Greeks — via the World Service — are going to relish a lecture from London on the meaning of the Elgin Marbles is a different matter.

The Editor
The Times

Sir,

  How the presence of the Elgin Marbles at the British Museum is necessary to its function as "a museum of all mankind" (Tristram Hunt, July 18, page 34) is never explained.  It has a mass of other ancient Greek sculptures to illustrate cultural history.  Its latest exhibition includes works which "are incredibly brown and boring", so that the quality of the marbles, the main attraction for most people, is irrelevant to the museum's purpose.  The point of its exhibition could be made in some ways better by book, tv or the internet.

  How far Neil MacGregor really appreciates the numinous quality of art must be doubted.  The marbles (which the museum seems to regard more as a trophy than a thing of delight) were made to create an aesthetic response in a particular context in time and place not to be the text of some university extension course.

  Yours faithfully,

  Dr Selby Whittingham,London

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