ICHARD JEFFERIES contrasted the pigeons outside the British Museum (‘To them the building is merely a rock, pierced with convenient caverns’) with the humans vainly seeking enlightenment inside, in an article first published in the and subsequently reprinted in his (1884). Jefferies admitted he felt ‘nearer knowledge’ standing beneath its portico and enjoying the ‘southern blue’ of the sky than when turning a book’s pages in its former Reading Room. Many of us may have felt a similar feeling of a great weight slipping from our shoulders on departure from this august, but
