Award-winning poet and Oxford Professor of Poetry, A. E. Stallings has marshaled poetry, personal letters, paintings, a dubiously translated 1801 firman, newspaper clippings, parliamentary proceedings, a Greek political campaign, and other lore in this deliciously detailed and gossipy history of the Parthenon (AKA, Elgin) Marbles. Her narrative encompasses the removal of the Marbles from the Athenian Acropolis, their various misadventures before and after installation in the British Museum, from shipwreck to boxing matches, and the debate over their future and possible reunion in Greece.

Bringing fresh air to a stale debate, Frieze Frame explores the effect the Marbles have had on poets, writers, painters, actors, architects, and vice versa—how poets and painters, for instance, have framed the Marbles’ place in art and culture. The poets Keats, Byron, and Cavafy, as well as an aristocrat who loses his nose and his fortune, a bad painter who commits suicide, and a general who takes his cat into battle, are among the cast of characters. In the author’s own words, “I am, to a certain extent, as interested in the strange stories and people surrounding the stones as the controversy [over their removal] and their fate.” Key for Stallings is the creative world of the Marbles, the ways that they appear in nineteenth (and twentieth) century writing and art, race theory and beyond, and the influence they have exerted in our society: cultural figures, maybe even characters, in their own right.