Museums
This museum is a lesson for all curators
The National Railway Museum is 50 years old, and it’s come over all literary. A quote from Howards End stands…
V&A’s new museum is a defiant stand against the vandals
In last week’s Spectator, Richard Morris lamented museum collections languishing in storage, pleading to ‘get these works out’. There’s an…
Museums: open up your vaults!
At any one time eighty per cent of the art owned by Britain’s many museums and public art galleries will…
In defence of decommissioning
There’s more than a grain of truth in the popular caricature of a curator as a mother hen clucking frantically…
Is the tide turning on restitution?
When passions are aroused, all of us are liable to overstate our case. Dan Hicks, a curator at Oxford’s extraordinary…
How French absolutism powered a techno-progressive revolution
The Enlightenment is back. Despite the best efforts of the past decade of handwringing about cultural imperialism and wailing over…
Tate’s finances are on the skids and I think I know why
Among the many destructive after-effects of the pandemic, the impact of two years of lockdowns has had serious consequences for…
How did we ever come to accept the inhumane excesses of capitalism?
What was neoliberalism? In its most recent iteration, we think of the market seeping into every minute corner of human…
Riding high
In March 1913 two horse painters met at the Lyceum Club to discuss the establishment of a Society of Animal…
Bring up the bodies
Margaret Mitchell on the ethics of museums of anatomical specimens
Relief fund
Will The Parthenon Project seize the Elgin Marbles?
Vive la gloire
The refurbishment of Paris’s galleries and museums continues apace, with money no object, finds Rupert Christiansen
Roll model
Why I’ve spent £68,500 on a tank
An honorary Frenchman
When the Courtauld Gallery’s impressionist pictures were shown at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris in 2019, the Parisian public…
Small but perfectly formed
Haydn is looking well — in fact, he’s positively glowing. The dignified pose; the modest, intelligent smile: it’s only when…
London notebook
In London for the first time in 18 months, I was as excited as a child on a birthday outing.…
The Spectator’s Notes
On Tuesday, I chaired a session at Policy Exchange addressed by Tony Abbott, the eloquent former prime minister of Australia,…
Monumental error
The misguided plan to ‘retain and explain’ statues
Looking for a new England
Dan Hitchens on our love affair with the Anglo-Saxons
Prime examples
Why we need a museum of British premiership
People’s galleries
Ignore the activists, says Tristram Hunt, Alexander von Humboldt’s Enlightenment project, embodied in a flash new Berlin museum, deserves celebrating
The Spectator’s Notes
‘Frost & Lewis’. It sounds like a programme amalgamating two of the most famous TV detectives. The former diplomat, Lord…
Little wonder
The British Museum’s aim is to use its collection ‘for the benefit and education of humanity’. If that manifests itself…
The big success of small shops
From time to time, usually when things are quiet, the government brings on the dancing girls. David Cameron made Carol…
