The Sir Robert Rede’s Lecture by Professor Dame Mary Beard
‘The boy who breathed on the glass at the British Museum’: what, or whom, is the past for?
In her Rede Lecture Professor Beard will use the image and reality of the museum as a way of exploring how we approach the past and why we study it. Rejecting any simple idea that the past has direct lessons or off-the-shelf solutions for us now, she will reflect on the wonder that the past opens up, on the capacity of history to make us better observers of ourselves and on the democratic deficit we will incur if we do not face up to what has gone before. For Beard, the past is at its best when (to use the museum metaphor) we open the glass case, remove the blue gloves, and get up close.
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