British Museum’s carbon splurge on ‘demeaning’ NFT scheme
Offsets, often based on paying to plant trees or absorb carbon through restoring other ecosystems such as peatlands, face criticism due to the difficulty of quantifying the…
Neil MacGregor interview: ‘Why don’t we have a Museum of England?’
Neil MacGregor studied many cultures of the world while director of the British Museum, but it is the English he finds the most perplexing. “Why is there…
Honey, I’ve bought Stonehenge! The true story of Cecil Chubb, its last private owner
Born in 1876, Chubb grew up in Shrewton, a farming village close to the stones. His father and grandfather were saddlers and harness makers. Chubb, though, was…
The World of Stonehenge, review: a thrilling attempt to explain Britain’s most mysterious monument
When do you think the rot set in for Britain? Blair? Suez? Wandering around the British Museum’s superb new exhibition, I fancy that it was about 4,000…
‘If people want Stonehenge to be a UFO landing site, that’s fine’
Wilkin’s vision of Stonehenge certainly sounds original. To return, though, to Hawkes’s remark, I can’t help wondering if it, too, will reflect its times. After all, it’s…
The British Museum should think again on NFTs
This week the museum announced that it is planning to sell a selection of JMW Turner’s paintings, including the watercolour A Storm (Shipwreck), as NFTs. It is…
‘We’ve no intention of removing anything from display’
Yet, for Finaldi, although providing context about the source of its sitter’s wealth is interesting, it is “not necessarily the most important thing to say” about the…
Teenage metal detectorist strikes bronze with ‘once in a lifetime’ hoard of axes
A teenager has struck gold – or rather, bronze – on just her third metal detecting dig after picking up the hobby in the summer holidays. Milly…
Greece’s Elgin Marbles ‘swap’ would be a bad deal for Britain
From the Greek perspective this attachment to the marbles is understandably difficult to fathom. There is a wonderful purpose-built gallery in the Acropolis Museum where they could…