Keats

We all have our own vision of the Parthenon. Lord Elgin, for one, seems to have treated it like Harrods. Hoping to decorate his Scottish stately home with the Marbles, he wrote long instructions to his agent: ‘The first on the list are the metopes, the bas-reliefs and the remains of the statues… Would it be permissible to speak of a Caryatid?’ The Greek gods must have thought not, because Elgin’s fortunes rapidly took a turn for the worse. He lost some of the Marbles in a shipwreck in 1802; was imprisoned in a French fortress by Napoleon; his wife had an affair with his best friend; and he lost

In 2016, Arifa Akbar’s elder sister, Fauzia, died suddenly in the Royal Free Hospital, London at the age of 45. Until the last hours of her life, the cause of her coughing, chest pain, night sweats and breathlessness had eluded a series of baffled experts. But you do not need a medical degree to hazard a guess at what might have been behind these symptoms. From Keats’s famous death to the consumptive heroines of 19th-century opera, spots of blood on a handkerchief were all that was missing to complete the picture. Only after Fauzia had a catastrophic cerebral haemorrhage, however, did someone think to test a sample of her spinal