From Cambridge with love: a call to mend the Parthenon’s broken treasures

In years past, English classicists used the knowledge they had gained in great places of learning like Cambridge to exploit and plunder Greece’s heritage. Among them was Philip Hunt, the Cambridge-trained classicist who enabled Lord Elgin to strip the Acropolis of more than half its surviving sculptures and haul them off to England, where they are now in the British Museum. These days, new voices are being heard on the banks of the river Cam. Cambridge graduate and author Bruce Clark returns to his old campus to ask why scholars and artists have changed their attitude to Greece. Instead of turning the Hellenic heritage to their own advantage, they seem determined to reunite and repair broken sculptures – and broken friendships.