Neil McGregor with a finely balanced assay of the ambivalent meanings of the British Museum collection of historic artefacts. There are some resonances with our own historical obsessions, although they written within a very different frame:
“The Catholic model of authority, as seen from London, was one where intellectual inquiry was limited, controlled, and often prohibited. On the political plane, France provided the clear demonstration that in an absolutist society, even one only idiosyncratically Catholic, true intellectual liberty was denied.
“The British Museum is often contrasted with Diderot’s Encyclopedia. Where the conceptual French characteristically wrote a book, the empirical British collected things and put up a building. But the key difference is surely that Diderot was put in prison and the Encyclopedia banned, whereas the British Museum was created by parliament specifically to promote intellectual inquiry, and to encourage the discovery of new kinds of truth”.
Mick is founding editor of Slugger. He has written papers on the impacts of the Internet on politics and the wider media and is a regular guest and speaking events across Ireland, the UK and Europe. Twitter: @MickFealty
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