The focus in the Western pictorial tradition is on the body of Christ, the bit you can paint, the Nativity and the infancy, but above all the Passion, where you can find images for every stage and every moment. Neil MacGregor Read Quote
London theatre is different: it is a commercial theatre that brings the whole of society into one place. And Shakespeare grasped, better than anyone else, what it means to engage the entire audience. Neil MacGregor Read Quote
In 1600, when Shakespeare’s audience at the Globe heard ‘Hamlet’ for the first time, every one of them knew very well what it meant to be handed a cup of wine by a figure of authority and told to drink. Neil MacGregor Read Quote
Because of the long, long history of British shipping, immigration, trade, empire, missionaries, you can have a better shot at telling a worldwide story in the British Museum’s collection than any other. Britain has been more connected with the rest of the world than any other country, for longer. Neil MacGregor Read Quote
The Louvre stopped buying paintings in 1848, and neither the Metropolitan nor the Hermitage acquire contemporary material. Neil MacGregor Read Quote
There is not much we can say with absolute confidence about the early church, but we can be fairly sure that the first Christians would not have dreamed of making a likeness of Jesus. Neil MacGregor Read Quote
Our collective memories are welcoming places, and one image, that of Jesus, has absorbed and appropriated elements of other traditions and aspirations in order to shape our communal remembering. Neil MacGregor Read Quote
Saddam Hussein was fascinated by ancient Babylon and Assyria. He made money available to protect and develop the great archaeological sites. The great achievements of Mesopotamian civilisation were pressed into the service of the Ba’athist regime. Neil MacGregor Read Quote
The British Museum was founded with a civic purpose: to allow the citizen, through reasoned inquiry and comparison, to resist the certainties that endanger free society and are still among the greatest threats to our liberty. Neil MacGregor Read Quote
The deciphering of ancient scripts changed forever the way Europeans were able to imagine the story of humanity, destroying centuries of received authority about the past with repercussions as important for our understanding of time and history as the geological studies of the same period. Neil MacGregor Read Quote
