"In the 1950s, to spare the blushes of the Board, it was decided that the acquisition of the earliest surviving British condom should appear before the Board as 'a piece of eighteenth-century armour'"

"At a symposium in Oxford in 1988 a paper was given on a coin-hoard of enormous importance smuggled out of Turkey into (ultimately) the United States; every scholar who attended has been banned by the Turkish authorities from ever again working professionally in that country, whether they had handled the coins or not... four of the Museum's staff were at the conference and have been so banned, although their only crime was to attend the lecture and discussion by some of the world's greatest experts on the hoard. This extraordinary decision strikes deeply at the base of academic freedom of expression, and we must wonder whether in these circumstances such a hoard can ever again be mentioned in academic publication."

"On my first day in the Museum as a very junior curator I was presented with three tasks; the one in my own speciality was the most difficult (to answer a query as to whether the Vikings ate onions)"

"The standard text-book, How to lie with Statistics, is by every civil servant's and every museum director's bedside"

"A demand came from a Minister of State of a particular ex-colonial country, who asked for the return of all the objects in the possession of the British Museum which came from that country... We were rather nonplussed by the request as much of the material was similar to that available in great quantity and superior quality among the collections of the museums and public buildings of his own country... We were even more puzzled as about a month later we received through official channels a significant gift of archaeological material from that country from an excavation which we had partly financed."

"To start to dismantle it by bowing to unthinking, if understandable, nationalistic demands would be to start a process of cultural vandalism which would make the politicisation of art in the 1930s in Germany look like a petulant child's destruction of its dinner... the other great museums of the world would be under pressure to follow suit and the spirit of man would be the poorer. In a period when all our aspirations are based on the hops of international agreement, we cannot let narrow nationalism destroy a trust for the whole world... What is pillage in the twentieth century was seen as a highly civilised and legal process in the eighteenth century... What is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander: the questionable legality of the sale of Charles I's great painting collection does not mean that we should sue half the world's great art museums for its return."

--- The British Museum. Purpose and politics. David M Wilson.