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The Elgin Marbles or The Parthenon Sculptures: what is the solution?

Best of the Spectator

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What Changed Your Mind About Stonehenge?

I do wonder whether we would accept that, say, the Greeks had legal ownership of Stonehenge when we were negotiating for its return. I don't think we can start to go trawl through the past and attempt to impose all of our own virtues and sensitivities on it. There have been some overtures in this direction but they've not really led anywhere. It's notoriously difficult. You cannot take a kind of year zero attitude towards these things and go back in time to 200 years when people obviously behave very differently. We used to argue that the air pollution happens, meant that they shouldn't be returned here. Now you wouldn't have thought it was.

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