In my long-ago role as the Dutiful Daughter, I took my parents to Crete, where we visited both Knossos and Phaistos, famous archaeological sites dating from the Minoan period. My father was captivated by Knossos, while my mother preferred Phaistos, her idea being that it was closer to the way it had been originally, while Knossos had been irrevocably altered by the renovations of Sir Arthur Evans: she did concede, however, that Sir Arthur’s works gave a boost to the imagination. The excursions were, in a sense, my personal introduction to the restoration/conservation dilemma that is recurrent in archeological circles.
Some years later I was trying to be the Good Mother, and part of my duty, I considered, involved taking my sons to various places of cultural interest. This turned out to be hard work. The then-baby was excluded from our visit to the Uffizi in Florence, but my eldest son was tormented by his fear that we were going to be trapped in the gallery forever, despite my assurances that I did know the Italian word for exit. The middle son, even then of a practical bent, said coolly, ‘All these Deposition pictures are mad, because everybody knows that bishops and archbishops weren’t invented at the time of the Crucifixion.’
The baby grew up, as babies will, and when he was 15, I took him to the British Museum. A previous visit to the National Gallery and a sighting of the El Grecos had not been a marked success, but I kept on trying. Although I had asked him politely to refrain from political comment, there were mutterings of discontent almost immediately. As we made our way through rooms full of impressive and enormous artifacts from the Ancient World, a disgruntled question was asked: ‘Haven’t they got anything of their own stuff?’ This discontent naturally grew when we reached the gallery containing the Parthenon Marbles.
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I grew up thinking of these mighty works of sculpture as the Elgin Marbles, while having only a vague idea of who Lord Elgin was. I eventually learned that he was a Scottish nobleman, military man and diplomat, and had been educated, predictably enough, at Harrow and Westminster schools, and at St Andrew’s University before being ‘finished’ in Paris. His life stretched from 1766 to 1841, and in 1798 he was appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, of which Greece had been a part for more than