If the National Portrait Gallery buys the £50m Portrait of Omai, it would be wonderful to loan it to Tahiti for a period
Joshua Reynolds's painting of a Polynesian man who travelled to Europe is emblematic of the extraordinary meeting of European and Pacific cultures 250 years ago
UK politicscomment
Don’t trash talk museums at this perilous time: we must adapt—not throw away—our cultural heritage
Cultural institutions—like religious buildings—can be spaces of good and harm, we cannot simply denounce their histories as one or the other, says museum director Nicholas Thomas
Restitutioncomment
'We need to confront uncomfortable truths about European colonial appropriation'
Nicholas Thomas, professor of historical anthropology at Cambridge University, on the French President's statements about African artefacts