2025-03-17
38 分钟This is the Guardian.
Hello, I'm Charlotte Higgins and I'm the author of the long read you're about to hear.
As the Guardian's chief culture writer, I've been thinking about the British Museum on and off for 25 years and through 2024.
In the wake of a series of crises at the institution, I spent months interviewing dozens of present and former staff members and trustees and exploring the museum itself from its labyrinthine basements to its roof.
I wanted to try to get a better grasp of a very strange and fascinating institution that, despite being incredibly famous, is not well understood.
This kind of deep, detailed reporting takes an immense amount of time and it's expensive.
If you would like and are able to support us to do this kind of reporting, you can support the Guardian through the link in the show notes.
We're not owned by a billionaire and we rely on the support of our readers and listeners like you.
Thanks so much and I hope you enjoy the piece.
Welcome to the Guardian long read showcasing the best long form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.
For the text version of this and all our longreads, go to theguardian.com longread the ghosts are Everywhere can the British Museum Survive its Omnicrisis by Charlotte Higgins Read by Davine Henry the British Museum is everybody's idea of a museum, but at the same time it is hardly like a museum at all.
It is more like a little state.
The rooms you visit on a day out are the least of it.
The museum is not the contents of its display cases.
It is an embassy, a university, a police station, a science lab, a customs house, a base for archaeological excavations, a place of asylum, a retail business, a publisher, a morgue, a detective agency.
We're not a warehouse or a mausoleum.
Its chair, the UK's former Chancellor George Osborne, told guests at the museum's annual trustees dinner in November.
On the contrary, it is both these things and others.
Beside it is a sprawling, chaotic reflection of Britain's psyche over 300 years its voracious curiosity and cultural relativism, its pugnacious superiority complex, its restless seafaring and trading, its cruel imperial enrichment, its brilliant scholarship, its brutality, its idealism itself, its post colonial anxiety.
All of this is expressed through the amassing of objects, a demented accumulation, a mania for hoarding that in any human would be regarded as a kind of illness.