British Museum

• “When the question of its sale came up, the radical politician John Wilkes had advised the British parliament to turn it into a national gallery: “A noble gallery ought to be built in the garden of the British Museum for the reception of this invaluable collection.””

  Simon & Schuster: The Dragon’s Trail

• “A twelfth century author of quite different character had a good hold upon the people; the number of copies of Geoffrey of Monmouth must have been considerable, for the British Museum now has thirty-five copies and Bodley's Library sixteen.”

  Old English Libraries; The Making, Collection and Use of Books During the Middle Ages

• “No age can ever have been as stridently sex – conscious as our own; those innumerable books by men about women in the British Museum are a proof of it.”

  A room of one's own

• “There is a papyrus in the British Museum containing medical prescriptions which was written about 1200 B.C.; and the famous EBERS papyrus, which is devoted to medical matters, is reckoned to date from about the year 1550 B.C.”

  Bygone Beliefs

• “Conning for an hour in the British Museum the pages of works devoted to extinct, half-extinct, obscured, and ruined families appertaining to the quarter of England in which he proposed to settle, he considered that d'Urberville looked and sounded as well as any of them: and d'Urberville accordingly was annexed to his own name for himself and his heirs eternally.”

  Tess of the d'Urbervilles

• “Even the British Museum does not include works on phallicism in its catalogue, and special permission has to be obtained to consult them.”

  Bygone Beliefs

• “Among the Harleian MSS. in the British Museum is a small volume written on parchment by Humphrey Wanley, which includes a copy of a curious inventory of vestments, plate, books, and other goods made in the time of John Rous, 1464.”

  Old English Libraries; The Making, Collection and Use of Books During the Middle Ages

• “The reference is no doubt to Mr. Joseph Planta, Assistant-Librarian of the British Museum 1773, Principal Librarian 1799-1827.”

  Life of Johnson

• “Just like the British Museum — which has bought fakes, duds, phonys, wasting millions in its time — most museums have spent fortunes on fraud.”

  The Great California Game

• “He failed at the moment, but the collection was finally purchased and presented to the British Museum by a generous relative of his own, Lord Francis Egerton.”

  Louis Agassiz His Life and Correspondence

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