Will The Parthenon Project seize the Elgin Marbles?

Thirty-five years ago, the late Christopher Hitchens published a book about the Elgin Marbles. Unsurprisingly, it was a polemical work; he was passionately campaigning for the return of the sculptures to Athens. But that was not the reason why I wrote a scathing review of it for The Spectator. Parts of it were plagiarised, as I showed, from the classic book by William St Clair; and in some places Hitchens dealt with the awkward fact that the evidence did not fit his claims by abbreviating the quotations, filtering out the unwanted bits.

Hitchens replied with a thunderously disdainful attack on me in the letters page. I said to the then editor, Charles Moore, that I feared that if I met Hitchens at a Spectator party he would punch me on the nose. ‘Don’t worry,’ Charles replied, ‘he’s not like that. No, he’ll just wait until you publish a book, and then write a review trashing it.’ (I said he would have a job on his hands, as my next book would be an edition of 17th-century correspondence, mostly in Latin. ‘Oh, that won’t stop him,’ said Charles, merrily.)

There is a long history, much of it honourable, of British people campaigning for the return of the sculptures and lambasting Elgin, the British government and the British Museum. Sometimes special factors apply: in Hitchens’s case, it was probably relevant that he had a Greek Cypriot wife. Philhellenism has been a strong element in our culture – in the old days, arising from a classical education, and more recently from Greek holidays. ‘We love Greece’, British people say, as if referring to a personal friend, when what they mean is that they have enjoyed their visits there and met many friendly Greeks.