Historian William St Clair, author of “Lord Elgin and the Marbles,” judges Mary as “a rather silly girl,” based on her letters. But her correspondence and diaries provide the best dish.

On May 22, 2025, the government of the United Kingdom signed the much-discussed treaty transferring sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, which included a lease agreement for the ...

The Elgin Marbles, taken from the Parthenon, ... That ambassador's name was Lord Elgin, and those sculptures, which ended up in the British Museum, are better known as the Elgin Marbles.

British diplomat Lord Elgin was the ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, which then ruled Greece, in the early 19th century. ...

In 1816 a UK parliamentary inquiry found that Lord Elgin had acquired the marbles legally, he then sold them to the British Museum. But campaigners who want the sculptures to be returned to ...

In the UK, Lord Elgin received support and criticism. He sold them to the UK government in 1816 before the marbles were passed into the trusteeship of the British Museum. Image: The ancient ...

What are the Elgin Marbles, and why are they so controversial? The sculptures, first carved 2,500 years ago, were brought to Britain in the 19th Century by British ambassador Lord Elgin.

When Lord Elgin, a British aristocrat, sailed home from Greece in the early 1800s, he also shipped to England some of the greatest treasures of antiquity: a collection that included statues of ...

The Elgin Marbles were created between 447 and 432 B.C. as architectural decor for the Parthenon—the temple of the Greek goddess Athena—on the Acropolis in Athens.

The campaign to recover the marbles began almost as soon as they were taken down from the Parthenon, and some of the earliest detractors were Lord Elgin’s peers. In 1811, the poet Lord Byron ...

Work under way on the Elgin Marbles in 1949 Getty Images At the time, the Parthenon had fallen into a derelict state following the Ottoman Empire's occupation of the region in the 15th century.

Better that than agree to loaning him the marbles – and falling into Osborne’s PR trap ... Whether they were obtained legally or illegally by Lord Elgin will never be resolved.