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This chapter discusses the developments in terms of research grants and research funding of the newly established AHRB. By 2002 to 2003, during its fifth year, the AHRB's total budget had increased from £17.9 million to £64.8 million. During this period, non-programmed costs were capped at five per cent. Putting aside its administrative costs, the AHRB in its fifth year had programmatic expenditures of £61.7 million, a 20 per cent increase from the initially predicted expenditure. Of the £61.7 million, £9 million was allocated to the operation of museums and galleries of English institutions and the rest was equally divided between postgraduate awards and research awards throughout the UK. As funding rose, intellectual ambitions also increased. Several ambitious projects were initiated such as the editing of Francis Bacon's works, the creation of public policy concerning the film and television of Britain and Europe, the pursuing of the long-delayed multinational Romanian project, and several other projects. During this period, the AHRB garnered a distinct sense of direction and momentum. Over three years, the applications of research funding increased to 58 per cent. The applications for the postgraduate awards increased to 20 per cent in a year and the four year doctoral submission rate for arts and humanities students increased to 78 per cent.

Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals, a patron of Greek culture, founded in Alexandria, capital of his Egyptian empire, the Library, the greatest depository of Greek literature, and the Museum, a research institute. Science made great advances in the Museum. The Library produced great scholars but little new literature. The principal philosophical innovation of the period was the rise of Skepticism, which utterly rejected high beliefs, whether tethered or not. Greek Skepticism is the ancestor of modern Positivism and Pragmatism, not of Cartesian skepticism. It was quite correct for its time, but it is a good thing that it did not prevail, for it would have eliminated the element of imagination that is essential to science.

Collecting music to provide mirrors for the reflection of self-identity had become a passion for modern Jews by the beginning of the twentieth century. Transforming the earlier storage chamber (geniza) used by synagogues to gather community records into archives, libraries, and museums, cantors and folklorists alike recontextualized the music of the past so that it would have modern meanings. Specific collectors provide a series of linked narratives for the chapter. Eduard Birnbaum collected sacred music in Königsberg, Max Grunwald and Friedrich Krauss collected Jewish folklore and folk music in Vienna, and Konrad Mautner and A. Z. Idelsohn aestheticized and modernized the technologies of representation locally in the Austrian Alps and globally in the Jewish Diaspora. The great collections of the early twentieth century have surveyed until the present, as Jewish museums and Jewish memory work in the era following the Holocaust.

This lecture presents the text of the speech about art museums in England delivered by the author at the 2007 Isaiah Berlin Lecture held at the British Academy. It comments on the role of museums as palaces or powerstations. The lecture suggests that the shape and size of museum buildings are bound to reflect not only their purpose but also the cultural assumptions of the period in which they were created, or recreated. It describes the Louvre and the Fitzwilliam Museums.

This chapter presents Reich's predictions (which 30 years later seem to have proven largely correct) about the future of music that were first printed as part of the program note to a concert at the Guggenheim Museum in May 1970, and then published in Synthesis, no. 2, Spring 1971.

Those with responsibilities for the display of inscriptions in museums and other public places have in recent years been addressing the challenge of how the riches of the ancient texts can be conveyed to a public with little or no knowledge of Latin or Greek. The choice of texts should not ignore the casual messages of daily life from graffiti and painted slogans, nor should the later ‘forgeries’ of ancient texts or the innocent errors of stonecutters be excluded. Electronic media can bring to life both ancient images and texts, and can help in presenting difficult or incomplete texts. Inscriptions speak directly from the remote past, and meeting the challenge of transmitting their messages to the modern visitor will certainly repay the effort.

This chapter discusses occasions for remembering. Occasions are a key issue for understanding how institutions work their past: they allow the study of remembering rather than the study of static representations of the past. An institution's narratives may be collected in an archive, but if this collection is rarely used, the narratives have no life of their own. Rather, it is necessary to discover the activities in which such representations are used. For an institution, remembering necessarily is a social event, involving at least two, and perhaps millions of people. Retelling and remembering of this sort require proper occasions. Without its proper occasion, a story rarely or never gets told. This chapter presents a taxonomy of the types of occasions for narrative, including events, places, memorials, and memory artifacts.

This chapter locates issues of heritage and preservation in broader debates about ownership of ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ property and its stewardship (or conservation) as an emerging representation of good governance. Phases of this relationship are considered at three ‘site-museums’. Initially, some in the United States saw Shakespeare's Birthplace as its own heritage and tried to acquire it. Secondly, Britain, which still spoke for Canada in matters of foreign policy, cooperated with the United States to protect monumental and scenic interest at Niagara Falls. This took place as national parks were emerging as a form of representational culture. Finally, British and American voluntarist groups come together to protect Carlyle's House, London, with government backing behind the scenes as a form of cultural diplomacy.

Thomas Barbour occupied many roles in the lives of Archie and Marjorie Carr: mentor, parent figure, colleague, collaborator, benefactor, role model, and most of all, friend. Over the course of their friendship with Barbour, the Carrs matured as scientists. Archie in particular published extensively as a result of his taxonomic research on the turtle collections at the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). Later, when his interests shifted from systematics to ecology and conservation, Carr continued to draw on taxonomy to determine which species most needed protection. In fact, throughout his long career, he cited taxonomy as one of the critical components of conservation. The Carrs reciprocated Barbour's kindness in many ways, from sending oranges to arranging for an honorary doctorate to heaping lavish praise on his popular books. It is possible to identify in the long friendship with Barbour the seeds of the characteristics that would make Carr a renowned scientist, conservationist, and writer.

This chapter considers objects as displayed in museums, architecture, and consumer goods. It unwraps the meanings of a Japanese suit of armour in the Tower of London, and then moves on to discuss the hybrid architecture and design of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, known in the West as the Victoria Terminus in Mumbai. In a final example, the case of football and soccer evokes debates on globalization and the global condition.

During the height of Western imperialism in Egypt from 1882 to 1922, the British ran the country and the French directed the Antiquities Service. Two contemporary artistic allegories expressed Western appropriation of the pharaonic heritage: the façade of Cairo's Egyptian Museum (1902) and Edwin Blashfield's painting Evolution of civilization in the dome of the Library of Congress (1896). The façade presents modern Egyptology as an exclusively European achievement, and Evolution presents ‘Western civilization’ as beginning in ancient Egypt and climaxing in contemporary America. The illustrated cover of an Arabic school magazine (1899) counters with an Egyptian nationalist claim to the pharaonic heritage. A woman shows children the sphinx and pyramids to inspire modern revival, and Khedive Abbas II and Egyptian educators, not European scholars, frame the scene. The careers of three Egyptologists — Gaston Maspero, E. A. W. Budge, and Ahmad Kamal Pasha — are explored to provide context for the allegories.

Donald Wiseman, a leading assyriologist, had a distinguished service in the RAF during the Second World War under Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park and later in the Mediterranean as Chief Intelligence Officer. After time working at the British Museum on thousands of cuneiform tablets and as a member of Mallowan's team excavating Nimrud, he took up the Chair of Assyriology at SOAS in 1961. Wiseman, who was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1969, worked to advance archaeological work in the Near East.

John Kent FBA, Keeper of Coins and Medals in the British Museum from 1983 to 1990, was the world's leading authority on the coinage of the late Roman Empire and presented the coinage of that complicated period in a modern and systematic way. He published The Roman Imperial Coinage (RIC) volumes VIII and X. Kent studied the Merovingian coins from the Sutton Hoo Mound 1 ship burial and was able to provide evidence towards a revised interpretation of the mound's historical context. Obituary by Andrew Burnett and Marion Archibald.

The fifth chapter provides an in‐depth examination of the establishment of the Bohemian National Museum, the individuals and intellectual motivations that prompted its creation, and its impact on national sentiment. This chapter argues that the National Museum was a new type of national institution that was based on the principle of public consumption of national culture and national myth. Its aristocratic founders established it, without royal patronage, to serve the interests of the community at large. The museum's founders intended this institution to be simultaneously a hub for scientific and literary inquiry, a repository for the relics of the nation's past, and the means by which they could give the nation and its history tangible form.