"There remains the burning ethical issue: by what moral right do the UK Government and the Trustees of the BM cling on to objects obtained under immeasurably different, neo-colonial and neo-imperial conditions, and – arguably – under false, pseudo-legal pretences?
It is this issue among others that distinguished American poet and Athens-resident Alicia Stallings addresses so skilfully and movingly in a remarkable and timely essay published in the 75th anniversary issue of The Hudson Review. Some essay! Over 120 pages long with a suitably hefty title: ‘Frieze Frame: How Poets, Painters (and Actors and Architects) Framed The Ongoing Debate Around Elgin and the Marbles Of The Athenian Acropolis’. ‘What better way’, she writes, ‘for a post-Brexit Britain to display large-mindedness, its good faith, generosity, its participation in the brotherhood of nations’ than to make the ‘magnificent gesture’ of reunification?
Hear, hear. Lord Byron, author of ‘The Curse of Minerva’, would undoubtedly approve."
Professor Paul Cartledge, BCRPM's Vice Chair writing in Neo Kosmos, Monday 12 June 2023
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