Things are getting better, though. The opening of the Great Court in Dec. 2000—the largest covered square in Europe—finally restored to the museum its focal point. For the past 150 years used as the book stacks of the British Library, the courtyard remains dominated by the enormous rotunda of the Reading Room. The blue chairs and desks, with ingenious fold-out lecterns, have shouldered the weight of research by Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky as well as almost every major British writer and intellectual.
