In its first half-century the British Museum was dominated by the influence of Sir Joseph Banks, who had accompanied Captain Cook on his voyages along with Daniel Solander, a former pupil of Linnaeus and an early recruit to the curatorial staff of the Museum. Banks and Solander respectively enhanced the collections with enormous numbers of specimens from the South Seas and introduced the principles of Linnaean taxonomy. At home in Great Britain the past was being explored and debated by the literati of the age, while the tenets of classical design exerted a profound influence on architecture, painting, sculpture and the decorative arts. The British Museum began to develop its collections of antiquarian material from the ancient world, a process that received a significant boost with the defeat of Napoleon in Egypt and the consequent diversion to Bloomsbury of many important objects originally bound for the Musee du Louvre. There is much in this volume that will throw new light on this, one of the greatest museums of the world, and show its intimate interconnection with contemporary scholarship, artistic endeavour and polite learning.