Whether it's the discovery of $1.6 billion in Nazi-looted art or the news that Syrian rebels are looting archeological sites to buy arms, art crime is a glamorous subject that always grabs headlines. In her first book, America's only full-time professor of art crime explores the dark history of looting, smuggling and forgery, that lies at the heart of modern private art collections and many of the world's most renowned museums. Enlivened by fascinating personalities and scandalous events, Possession shows how collecting antiquities has been a way of creating identity, informed by a desire to annex the past while providing an illicit thrill along the way. Thompson's accounts of history's most infamous collectors - from the Roman Emperor Tiberius, who stole a life-sized nude Greek statue for his bedroom, to Queen Christina of Sweden, who habitually pilfered small antiquities from her fellow aristocrats, to Sir William Hamilton, who forced his mistress to enact poses from his collection of Greek vases - are as mesmerising as they are revealing.
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