David Abulafia

I put the case in last week’s Spectator that museums in this country have been gripped by a sort of infectious madness. Since I wrote that article the number of cases of museumitis has piled up further, and there are worrying signs that the infection is spreading into Europe. It has been announced that 32 of the Ghanaian ‘Crown Jewels’ are to be sent from the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum to Asantehene Otumfuo Osei Tutu II, the current king of the Asante, to be exhibited in the Manhyia Palace Museum in Kumasi. The idea is to put them on exhibition there for three years, after which they will be returned (as things stand). But the V&A has indicated that the loan may be renewable, with no end date.

It is becoming a familiar conundrum: whether to employ actors who match the ethnicity of the person they are portraying. Helen Mirren made the mistake of playing Golda Meir in a truly dreadful new film. The real mistake there was not the use of a non-Jewish actress, as some have complained, but the appalling quality of the script and production. Cleopatra was recently played by a black woman in a recent Netflix production, although the evidence strongly suggest she was fair-skinned. There is a suggestion she had some darker skinned ancestors, but the current convention seems to be that even a drop of blood is sufficient to confer blackness or its local equivalent.

Librarians across Cambridge University are on the look out. Their target, among the ten million-odd volumes in the main library and in the independently-run libraries of the colleges, is ‘problematic’ books. 'We would like to hear from colleagues across Cambridge about any books you have had flagged to you as problematic,' a memo sent to colleges by the University Library read. But surely what is most damaging is to bandy around words such as ‘harmful’ and ‘problematic’ without even defining them. It goes without saying that a great library will contain books that some, occasionally nearly all, readers will find disturbing. It would be absurd to put together a library on modern German history and to place Mein Kampf off limits.

On the eve of the First World War, Trinity College, Cambridge deposited four spears collected by Captain Cook during his first encounter with native Australians in the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology of Cambridge University. There they could be seen and studied by any visitor to Cambridge, rather than being hidden away in a cabinet of curiosities in the Wren Library at Trinity. Now, more than 250 years after Cook’s visit to Australia, they are to be returned to Sydney and to members of the tribe that originally made them. After they arrived in what became known as Botany Bay, Cook’s men confiscated about 40 of these rods from members of the Gweagal clan.

If Cambridge colleges were entitled to register protected characteristics, there is no doubt what they would be in the case of King’s College. Announcing the election of Dr Gillian Tett (currently at the FT) as the next Provost, the current Provost of King’s, Mike Proctor, has described the college as ‘this vibrant and forward-looking institution’. For at least a century its members have taken pride in its left-wing credentials. Whether Ho Chi Minh ever read the telegrams of support sent to him by the King’s College Students’ Union at the height of the Vietnam War is very doubtful, but at least they made the college’s Marxist student leaders feel important.

A good history book generates in the mind of its readers a series of visual images of people, places and events, blurry and perhaps not very accurate, but nevertheless the sort of thing that can be held in the memory. Television history challenges this because it provides ready-made versions of many of the visuals, and they too can become locked in one’s memory of historical events. Put differently, television takes over from individual imagination in portraying the past, and that is a particular problem for documentaries that do not admit to spicing up the past, as a costume drama will inevitably do. Rather, documentaries claim to uncover the truth.

The Rosetta Stone is said to be the most visited object in the British Museum. By and large the most popular, most beautiful or most impressive objects are found at the top of the shopping list of those who want to send objects back to their place of origin. Yet here is a piece of debris that, if installed in the Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza, would look as out of place as a dirty pair of trainers in the Athenaeum. This, after all is (or rather will be, after endless delays in its opening) the final resting place of Tutankhamun, a museum rich in gold and lapis lazuli lying in the shadow of the Great Sphinx and the three massive pyramids built by a much earlier dynasty of Pharaohs.