Is it time to turn the British Museum into the world’s great lending library? | Tim Adams

National treasures

It’s liberating to sense how a government whose primary concern is not fighting culture wars might return a grown-up freedom to public debate. A discussion at the British Museum last week, “Who owns the past?”, could not, in this sense, have been more timely. The debate, which marked the arrival at the museum of Nicholas Cullinan, its new director, featured contributions from Mary Beard, David Olusoga, Rory Stewart and Munira Mirza about the issues faced by museums as they incorporate discussion of colonial history into their collections, and examine questions of ownership.

Olusoga framed this debate by suggesting that “what we’re dealing with now is a backlog of discussions that we didn’t want to have in the past”. Cullinan, who oversaw the recent fabulous transformation of the National Portrait Gallery, loved the idea that “this universal museum is not [yet] universal enough”. Beard suggested that, in order to overcome reductive nationalistic arguments, we had to “get away from this idea that the British Museum is a great temple in Bloomsbury where, if you are a foreigner lucky enough to be able to pay for an air fare, you can come and see our treasures”. Instead, she argued, the museum might be viewed as the world’s great lending library, dramatically upping its commitment to loans to the world’s four corners. The historian, you were reminded, was herself the subject of political intervention in recent years – a national treasure whom the post-Brexit government attempted, scandalously, to veto as a trustee of the museum because of her pro-EU views. Hopefully those days are in the past.

Myths and legends

There should be a word to describe that sense that you have grown old with certain sports stars – identifying the accelerated seven ages of their careers as part of your own history. I vividly remember watching Jimmy Anderson’s debut overs in an England shirt, in a one-day international with Australia in 2002, and thinking here was someone with a proper bit of character, someone to follow. In the subsequent five or six years, when the English Test coaches seemed determined to break Anderson’s talent, often leaving the bowler on the sidelines, trying to change the way he played, that identification grew. You rooted for him. At Lord’s this week, Anderson will run in to bowl for England for the last time, now acknowledged as the greatest of all the country’s bowlers, and it is all that shared emotional history, not just the records, that he will carry with him. No doubt, like all the greats, he will approach the match with undimmed spirit and intent. As Joe DiMaggio observed, to a fan who asked why he went through the same meticulous preparation at the end of his career as at the start: “It might be that someone here hasn’t seen me play before.”

Futurism

Prophets are not always recognised in their own press releases. It’s 40 years ago this month since William Gibson’s Neuromancer, the book that most closely foretold our virtual world, was published – and at the time it was hardly noticed. This paper was among very few that carried a review of a book that among other things coined the idea of “cyberspace”, which Gibson defined as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators… a graphic representation of data abstracted from banks of every computer in the human system”. The Observer’s science-fiction reviewer wrote in July 1984: “I think Gibson’s off his trolley, but when he settles down he should be capable of writing first-class SF.” I know because I found it on the internet.