Coordinates: 51°31′10″N 0°07′37″W / 51.519459°N 0.126931°W / 51.519459; -0.126931

The British Museum, in London, is widely considered to be one of the world's greatest museums of human history and culture. Its permanent collection, numbering some eight million works, is amongst the finest, most comprehensive, and largest in existence and originates from all continents, illustrating and documenting the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present.

The British Museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. The museum first opened to the public on 15 January 1759 in Montagu House in Bloomsbury, on the site of the current museum building. Its expansion over the following two and a half centuries was largely a result of an expanding British colonial footprint and has resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, the first being the British Museum (Natural History) in South Kensington in 1887. Some objects in the collection, most notably the Elgin Marbles from the Parthenon, are the objects of intense controversy and of calls for restitution to their countries of origin.

Bonnie Greer, OBE (born 16 November 1948, Chicago), is an American-British playwright and critic.

Greer's father was born to a family of Mississippi sharecroppers. He was stationed in the UK during World War II and took part in the D-Day landings. Greer was born on the west side of Chicago, the eldest of seven children born to Ben, a factory worker, and Willie Mae, a housewife. Though she began writing plays at the age of 9, she originally set out on a legal career, but dropped out when her professor told her he did not think women should have a career in law. Instead she studied theatre in Chicago under David Mamet's supervision and at the Actors Studio in New York with Elia Kazan.

Greer visited the UK as part of a production at the Edinburgh Festival in 1986 and has been based in the UK since then; she acquired British citizenship in 1997. She has worked mainly in theatre with women and ethnic minorities, and is a former Arts Council playwright in residence at the Soho Theatre and for NITRO, once known as the Black Theatre co-operative. Greer has played Joan of Arc at the Theatre Atelier in Paris.