BRITISH MUSEUM: Storehouse of Civilizations

Exquisitely curated and designed with hundreds of colour and other illustrations and artworks, we are invited to see Dr Sloane's curiosities and the beginnings of the British Museum, described by Virginia Woolf as 'One solid immense mound, very pale, very sleek in the rain', once a jumbled store in large damp chambers from which knowledge was organised to create an understanding of the world and of humanity's place within it. On 15th January 1759, following the passing of an Act of Parliament six years previously, a new museum opened its doors in a house in Bloomsbury. It held and displayed the collections of three men and their families - the physician and entrepreneur Sir Hans Sloane, who donated 71,000 books, dried plants, minerals and antiquities to the nation; the manuscript collection of the antiquarian Sir Robert Cotton, including the Lindisfarne Gospels and two copies of Magna Carta; and the 8,000 volume library of the politician and bibliophile Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford. James Hamilton recounts the remarkable 250 year history of the British Museum, a world renowned public institution whose collections of more than eight million objects and artifacts are explored in the cultural context in which the Museum came into being, its subsequent expansion and diversification, controversies and the legacies and influence nationally and globally. Colour illus. 208pp, pagemarker.