Hitchens is articulate as ever, but you should know (even if he doesn't) that each year the number of people who visit the British Museum AND SEE THE ELGIN MARBLES THERE is far greater than the number of people who visit any part of the whole city of Athens for any reason. That is why the collections of the British Museum, with its great remit to educate and enlighten a vast public free of charge, is a far greater cultural artefact than the Parthenon itself, with or without the Marbles enclosed in a shiny new glass box a mile away. Cast off your post-colonial guilt - keep the Marbles where the most people can see them, and within a priceless context of ancient Greek artefacts and scholarship. They can never be returned to the Parthenon itself so the 'in situ' argument is nonsense. And by the way, the building of the new, empty museum in Athens caused irreparable archaeological damage to the ancient city below. This was a political, not a cultural or archaeological, gesture.