Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I'm Mark Filipino. I'm the host of the FT News Briefing, usually, but today I'm in for Lila Raptopoulos.

My colleague, Stephen Bush, loves, well, he loves things are kind of grotesque. Things like mummies, severed hands that were once believed to be magical, and don't forget, shrunken heads.

Stephen is an associate editor at the FT and usually writes about politics, but he loves

these ghoulish things so much that he recently wrote a column defending museums that put them on display.

His basic line of thinking is, if they weren't stolen, they should be on

display because people love them. Stephen actually credits this kind of exhibit with his own love

of art and museums, and he's talking to me from London. Stephen, welcome. Thanks very much for having

me. Well, first of all, I got to ask, what caused you to write this piece? I mean, so to let

the light in on the magic of the columnist's craft, because I've been mostly covering the UK general

election and the new government, I realized I was running out of material and I thought,

what's the thing I'm going to go do on holidays, go to a bunch of museums. And I'd also recently watched, rather than being on myself,

a panel at the British Museum in which they talked about the wider issues about what's on display in museums,

where one of the issues I thought they completely swerved was this question about the bodies of the dead, a huge draw,

particularly for nosy children and for Gothic teens, both of which I very much was.

And I kind of thought, you know what, someone should make the point.

And this panel kind of danced around because it's a bit awkward.

Well, I'm curious.

You said that they swerve the question.

What did they say?

Well, it was one of those sort of, oh, you know, well, on the one hand, some of these

things are stolen.

On the other hand, some things which aren't stolen, you have kind of various myths of

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