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The lights go out, the government has fled to its bunker, everything is abandoned, and the palaces of culture and pleasure are left unguarded. You have a torch and a burning desire to "save" something for the nation (or, perhaps, just for yourself)
Bryan Appleyard
I would break into the British Library and loot the Lindisfarne Gospels. Created by our greatest unsung genius, Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne between 698 and 721, it was a road map out of the Dark Ages that followed the departure of the Romans. Through sheer decorative splendour, it celebrated the possibility of a land as civilised as Roman Britain, but kinder, gentler and more tolerant. If one thing needs to be saved from the new Dark Ages, of which this blackout is the symbolic expression, then it is this fabulous embodiment of the best that we might have been.
Neal Ascherson
You loot what you want to give back. The government has fled, which means that They are on the way in, their lead tanks already under Big Ben. So what you loot depends on what you calculate They would want, and what you want from Them.
First thing is getting into their temporary Combat HQ in the Dorchester. That means something for the silver-helmeted guards on the door. Something small, what they call portable antiquities: a fistful of gold Celtic coins from the British Museum will do. Once inside, a young captain is distributing passes and armbands for "security-cleared local staff". Out of my briefcase slide 18th-century Indian and Chinese silks from the Victoria and Albert Museum: "Your lady will appreciate . . ."
Now that I can move and ignore curfew, I need a car. The fat Provost-Marshal is a bullion type, so I offer the Sutton Hoo buckle, all gold and garnets, for a Humvee with driver and full tank. Excellent! Next move is to commandeer fuel distribution in central London. That rather intellectual logistics General gloats over the Queen's Leonardo drawings and the Holbeins I ripped (noisily, but the din of other looters with chainsaws covered me) out of their frames in the National Portrait Gallery. How rapidly the General sees that he needs a local assistant for petrol and diesel distribution!
That means I have lorries and manpower. The soldiers gawp but do nothing as we roll the winged Assyrian bulls out of the BM and truck them off to the Cheddar Caves. My nephew will "discover" them and be rewarded with the curatorship of what's now renamed the "Bloomsbury Universal Heritage Depository". But when I try the same thing with the Parthenon Marbles, they don't arrive at the caves and I discover that the chief trucker, a man called Papadakis, took the convoy up to Felixstowe where a Greek freighter was waiting. So what! Can you win them all? I wouldn't be finance minister today if I hadn't been generous and given the Rosetta Stone to the president of the Investigative Tribunal. But a few things I did keep for myself. That old Schmeisser machine carbine from the Sikorski Museum, which the Poles brought back from Narvik - the black sheen of it, the slick cocking sound! And I went to the National Gallery at dawn on the first day of looting to rescue Ovid among the Scythians by Delacroix. Well, it's a painting about being civilised among barbarians. These days, a cultured man has to take what he can get.
Alain de Botton
A matter that lies at the heart of your question is: "What does it mean to possess something?" Normally, we take possession to mean "ownership", understood from a legal, financial point of view. The thrill of authority breaking down therefore lies in the possibility of grabbing new things for oneself. But unfortunately, legal ownership doesn't necessarily always mean "real" ownership. You can own a picture and, because you don't look at it properly, not own it. And similarly, you can not own a picture but, by profound engagement with it, own it far more than the apparent owner. This is an incredibly long-winded and obscure way to say that I'm in no way excited by the prospect opened up by your question. The idea of things being left unguarded is a melancholy one, civilisation and the rule of law being - at the end of the day - quite a good thing really. The anarchist in me is very dormant.
Julie Burchill
The Portrait of Martin Luther (not Martin Luther King, though I like him too) by Lucas Cranach the Elder - it's in an art gallery in Bristol. The greatest religious leader of all time, and my hero.
Carmen Callil
I'd go to Portobello Cars in west London and steal the largest truck I can find. I'd put my dogs in it, and then pick up my friends (who shall be nameless for this purpose) from the following streets: Blenheim Crescent, St Johns Villas, Frithville Road, Granville Terrace, Eton Road, St Marks Road, Holymead Road, Grosvenor Square, and about 20 others. I'd then flee with all of them and their animals to Charleston Farmhouse in Sussex, the only place in Britain I'd bother to save.
Matthew Collings
I'd pull the plug on Bill Viola's plasma TV screens, currently showing in the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. Closing down his sanctimonious bilge would help civilisation. We wouldn't have to look at what are, in effect, sleazy ads - insinuating and fake, appealing to all the sentimentalism in goody-goody middle-class culture while in reality selling the absence of any real content back to us consumerist suckers. The only reason Viola's films of Cape Coddities emoting in pretentious slow-mo are in the National Gallery at all is that, for at least two decades (since the greed-is-good 1980s), we've been so bombarded by moronic US-style PR-thinking that we really do think banal, literal-minded, philistine-pleasing kitsch is the same as Giotto. Rather than merely saving a single special artwork for the nation, my benign act of terrorism would be an attempt to save the souls of the entire population.
Richard Cork
Many looters, understandably enough, would plump for the biggest room in the National Gallery. But I'll settle for the smallest. Although it houses only three paintings, they're by my favourite artist: Piero della Francesca. Looking at his Baptism, Nativity and St Michael, I feel spellbound. The figures all seem transfixed. Held in a state of suspense, they awe me into silence.
Edwina Currie
What would I loot? A first folio of Shakespeare, maybe, or a handful of whacking great diamonds from De Beers. Or maybe the Queen's secret diaries: I'd love to know what she thinks of us.
Antonia Fraser
Looting is one thing and deeply reprehensible; liberation, on the other hand, is a harmonious process by which civilisation is spread about in new directions . . . This, at any rate, is the defence I am preparing for my alleged crime of "stealing" Pisanello's The Vision of St Eustace from the National Gallery in London during the recent riots. After all, what was I to do? The doors were open, the crowds were milling, enormous artworks were leaving the building and, as it was all happening, I had my own vision, much as St Eustace himself had a vision in the forest. St Eustace's vision, out hunting, was of a stag with a crucifix between its antlers which, as can be seen in the picture, literally stopped him in his tracks; my vision told me to rush into the National Gallery, dive towards my favourite picture and (with some difficulty) liberate it into my own care. As for subsequently "hiding" it at home, "denying" to the police who visited me after things had calmed down that I had taken it, I can explain that, too: St Eustace himself told me that he had never been happier than in my care and, after so many years in the National Gallery, he was thoroughly enjoying taking a trip to Notting Hill Gate.
PS: Lady Antonia Fraser, having been found guilty of theft on all counts, is currently awaiting sentence. In a big interview in Hello! magazine (double-page spread of the picture), she said that it was all worth it for the days and nights she had The Vision to herself.
John Gray
The late 19th-century nature writer Richard Jefferies produced a novel, After London, in which he imagined the capital flooded and overgrown with marsh and forest. In the aftermath of climate change, England reverts to the wild, and the remaining human population takes up a neo-medieval way of life. It is a vision that lingers in the mind, but I have always wondered what would happen to the animals in London's zoos if the capital were abandoned. A post-apocalyptic London in which tigers roam freely is a captivating prospect. With this in mind, my first act in the darkened capital would be to loot Fortnum & Mason of its most tasty meats. Pausing en route to load up with shanks of beef from a series of old-fashioned butchers' shops, I would then make my way over to London Zoo and deliver the cargo to the tigers. Once released, they would no doubt soon find other sources of food. But what could be more satisfying than easing the way for these beautiful creatures into a newly deserted world?
Adam Hart-Davis
I would sneak into the City Museum in Plymouth and take Henry Winstanley's salt. Born in Saffron Walden in 1644, Winstanley was a joker, an engraver and, above all, a social climber. His greatest achievement was to build the first Eddystone lighthouse - the world's first lighthouse on a rock in the open sea. The silver salt, or salt cellar, stands 19 inches high and is a replica of the building he completed in 1698. On 26 November 1703, the south coast was battered by the Great Storm. Winstanley was in his lighthouse, which was seen at midnight showing its light as usual, but when the sun came up the next morning, there was no sign that the lighthouse had ever existed, apart from a few bits of iron sprouting out of the rock . . .
Terry Jones
I'd like to make clear that I would consider looting only if it were for the benefit of our national heritage and if I were given a guarantee of freedom from prosecution. First, I would break into the offices of the Prime Minister and remove all files relating to the Iraq war. It would be such a shame if all the mendacity and hypocrisy that led up to the war were lost for ever to the nation or forgotten by future generations of voters. Second, I would break into the BBC and steal all the coffee-making equipment. I would then have it all hygienically destroyed so that its product could never again be foisted on the human race.
A L Kennedy
I would attempt to salvage the contents of a small newsagent: the food that isn't made of food, the drinks that aren't made of drink, the newspapers that have no news, the wonderful tapestry of porn and gossip and fear-mongering and porn and self-obsessed cant and tits and porn that fills the glossies and the supplements, and the perfectly legal and pacifying nicotine and alcohol we are supposed to need to get us through the day. A fitting memorial to all the joys of British life.
Prue Leith
I'd save the Netsuke collection, or some of it, from the V&A. Exquisite little toggle sculptures quite small enough to get in your pocket - I've lusted after them since I was 20, ever since Eduardo Paolozzi, lusting after me, gave me a tutorial while breathing ever closer. Never mind: it was worth it. I've been going back, unaccompanied and entranced, ever since. But touching them would be something else!
Magnus Magnusson
Looting? Just watch me! I would be down to the British Library in a flash to nick that most consummate of illuminated manuscripts, the Lindisfarne Gospels. What a marvellous and poignant book it is, richly redolent of the heroic age of Celtic Christianity in Britain. It was made in a little scriptorium on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne in the 690s in honour of the island's sainted former bishop, St Cuthbert. The scribe, Eadfrith, used the most elemental of materials: vellum sheets of scraped and cured calfskin, pens cut from goose-quills, ink made from soot bound with nothing more elaborate than the whites of birds' eggs, sachets of colouring from plant and mineral pigments. I would hang on to it until it was safe to trudge across the sands of the Pilgrims' Way and return this great treasure to the place where it truly belongs: the Holy Island of Lindisfarne.
Jonathan Meades
I shall go north. I want to save Portsmouth Dockyard, Lutyens's Marsh Court (the only arts and crafts building made from clunch) and Salisbury Cathedral, though I can hardly put them under my arm. The painting I most covet in Britain is Sir Thomas Aston at the Deathbed of his First Wife. It is by John Souch (circa 1594-1644), aka Souch of Chester (not where he was born, but where he became a freeman). It is in Manchester City Art Gallery. It teeters on the brink of Britain's late understanding of perspective. Every angle is wrong. It is as stilted as contemporary tombs (such as the Hertford and the Mompesson in Salisbury Cathedral) except that it is black. The spectrum is micro. The subjects are grief, nobility, reverence.
George Melly
With the exception of a few enthusiasts, dry historians and a handful of critics, the British public are for the most part indifferent to art. Bearing this in mind, I decided to choose for the nation a work to cause the maximum irritation - Tracey Emin's mucky bed. I love her "up yours" attitude.
If the nation has collapsed anyway, for my own pleasure - given a roof and four walls - I'd settle for Picasso's Weeping Woman (formerly in Roland Penrose's private collection, now in Tate Modern).
It's fairly small and very beautiful, an amazing fusion of cubism and expressionism, a great cry of rage and pain against tyranny; and it would give me, every day on waking to a bleak, dismal world, a sparkle of hope and optimism.
Rosie Millard
It would have to be the Donne Triptych, painted around 1478 by Hans Memling and currently on show at the V&A's "Gothic" exhibition, although its home is the National Gallery. Why? The patron and commissioner of the piece - the successful Welsh businessman Sir John Donne - is seen humbly praying in front of the Virgin, Child and spectacularly glam angels alongside Lady Donne, who is sporting a stupendous wimple, and their daughter. It should remind businessmen and women why transient capitalism always comes second to the immortal genius of true art. This will help us all when we are crouching in our bunkers and the City has gone to pot. And what better to save at Christmas time than a Christmas card?
Sir Patrick Moore
I'd drive up to London and loot the best piano, a really brilliant piano, and I'd take it home and play Viennese music to myself.
Estelle Morris
What would I loot? That's easy. I'd take the view from Waterloo Bridge. As the sun comes up on a clear autumn morning, there is no sight more inspiring, restful and unsettling at the same time. And where would I put it? Again, easy. I'd place it outside my office window, where at present all I can see is a never-ending stream of motorists bracing themselves for the Trafalgar Square one-way system.
Jan Morris
If the whole of Europe is ravaged, I shall somehow go at once to Budapest and steal the Crown of St Stephen, the one with the cockily tilted cross on top. But if only Britain is lootable, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford will provide me with a worthily eccentric substitute: the Alfred Jewel, made in the ninth century and found in the Athelney Marshes in 1693, which depicts the old king with one black eye and one grey, and a bit of a squint.
Andrew Neil
I would rush in to commandeer the Harrods Food Hall. It is a national treasure. More important, it has some of the best food and drink in the world. I would call the Salvation Army and ask them to rustle up 1,000 of the most deserving folk in the capital and tell them to come round. If the country was going to hell in a handbasket, then at least those with nothing would have the finest Christmas dinner ever.
Tim Parks
I'd go straight to Wellington's house at the bottom of Park Lane and walk off with Velazquez's The Water Seller of Seville. To save it for posterity, of course. And to see if it really would touch my heart every day. And if there was time after all the tender packing and transport arrangements, and if I could make it past the mobs emptying the electronics and designer clothes from downtown, there's a Zurbaran in the National - St Margaret, I think she's called - the most charming young woman, to keep Velazquez's little boy company. I honestly can't think of anything else I would like or couldn't buy with a bestseller or two (dream on, Tim). Hope the guys after the crown silly jewels tear each other to bits.
Corin Redgrave
Many of the treasures in the British Museum were looted by robber barons in previous centuries. I should start by repatriating the Parthenon Marbles to Greece, which has demanded their return in vain for as long as I can remember.
Francine Stock
I trust the Neils and the Sandys and the Nicks will have bagged the friezes and the Caravaggios and the Cezannes. I'm off to a storage depot to find Chris Ofili's 13 monkeys, exhibited last year as The Upper Room. Each image is a different molecule-vibrating hue - gold, turquoise, brown, red and black, and so on - with its own powerful mood. All are at once awe-inspiring and scary, hilarious and exhilarating, earth-bound and god-like. I'll turn a trick for a pantechnicon to carry them off, because they're not small and they have to come with David Adjaye's chapel-like setting.
Charles Saumarez Smith
There is one picture that I am preoccupied with saving and that is Raphael's Madonna of the Pinks. I would hate to think that an imminent holocaust (or, indeed, the government in its bunker) might rob us of keeping it in perpetuity on public display.
Colm ToibIn
The Mark Rothko room in its entirety and then carry it straight to Ireland where it belongs.
John Tusa
It has to be something that is more than itself. Ah yes. Just time to dash up to the British Museum, reach into a display case and take the Snettisham torque before the looters get it. Just 20cm of intricately plaited gold; 64 threads worked into eight separate metal ropes. Easy to carry, easy to hide, until the good times come back. What memories it carries. How great Celtic civilisation was two millennia ago; how endless our curiosity about the past was, that the torque's discovery in 1950 was greeted with amazement. All this in a few centimetres of twisted gold. Culture and civilisation in the palm of your hand.
Ann Widdecombe
I should dash into the Royal Veterinary College at Potters Bar and take away the skeleton of Foxhunter, the famous racehorse, which is displayed there. It is so much better than the dinosaurs because so much more modern, but still fascinating in its power. Pity they had to call him Foxhunter, though.
Michael Winner
My copy of Walter the Farting Dog. The only book I've read in the past 20 years.
Jeanette Winterson
I am going straight to the Saatchi Gallery and piling everything into Damien Hirst's spotted Mini - if he could design a roof-rack quickly, that would be a help. As I drive past Tate Modern I will grab Rebecca Horn's grand piano, and then I'm going for a quick run down Bermondsey to get a few Antony Gormleys from his studio, then back round Brick Lane to see if anyone has been foolish enough to leave Rachel Whiteread herself on the street. If so, I'm taking her home, too, via Berry Bros in St James's where we can get a case of Krug.
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