Dorothy King has talked about her book on the Elgin Marbles for some time now. The publishers’ comments on it say that it was timed to coincide with the Olympics, but clearly they missed that deadline. Bookstores still don’t have copies of it in stock, although it has been available to pre-order for over eighteen months now. This book has been considerably hyped, as the British Museum’s best defense for their retention of the marbles. Archaeologists & historians that I have spoken to seem distinctly unexcited about its impending publication, based on their previous dealings with Ms King.

From:
The Observer

Hands off our Marbles
Dorothy King defends the British Museum in her breezy history of the Parthenon sculptures, The Elgin Marbles, says David Smith
Sunday January 8, 2006
The Observer

The Elgin Marbles
by Dorothy King
Hutchinson £18.99, pp352

Blonde, glamorous and a fearless hunter of treasures, archaeologist Dr Dorothy King would perhaps inevitably be dubbed the ‘female Indiana Jones’. Such sobriquets can be both a blessing and curse. Invitations to academic conferences and TV programmes have dropped through the letterbox, but so, too, has a request to pose in Playboy (she refused).

Thankfully, the publisher of King’s first book, The Elgin Marbles, has resisted a front cover picturing her draped over the torso of Poseidon and declined to make much of her headline-grabbing exploits as scourge of the Greek government’s application to reclaim the marbles from the British Museum.

The main narrative is a winding history of the Parthenon and the outcrop on which it sits, the Acropolis in Athens. Ploughing through nearly 2,500 years of Persians, Romans, Christians, Byzantines, Ottomans, Anglo-French and Anglo-Greek squabbles is exhausting work. King is equally unstinting in her 60-page description and interpretation of the Parthenon’s metopes, pediments and frieze in a style.

In a style breezy and informal, she defends the legality of Elgin’s acquisition of the marbles and argues that he saved them from destruction or decay, adding: ‘The Parthenon sculptures which Elgin brought back have been in the British Museum far longer than Greece has existed as a country.’ King also chastises Greece for failing to care properly for the marbles it has.