The Elgin Marbles continue to be one of the more controversial issuesof the contemporary debate over cultural property and questions of itsmoral ownership. Unfortunately but perhaps inevitably, the pace ofdiscussion is often driven by emotion. In this highly chargedatmosphere, misunderstandings and misrepresentations are so oftenrepeated that they gain a reality of their own and are very rarelychallenged.

Recently the corpus of disinformation was givensustenance from a new quarter. In two separate publications, one of themin this journal, William St. Clair launched an attack on the BritishMuseum and its care of the Parthenon sculptures. As this work is nowlikely to enter the core bibliography of the Parthenon sculptures, I amgrateful to the editors of IJCP for this opportunity to correct some of its many misrepresentations and errors of fact.