The British Museum in Bloomsbury is a most extraordinary place to spend a few hours. The treasures of antiquity on display from Egypt, Sumer and Greece, to the artefacts of Asia and Africa, are breathtaking. Yes, I know they stole them all and doubtless should give some back, but as a one-stop repository of what we might describe as ancient culture, the British Museum is impossible to beat. Of course, as an emblem of British imperial larceny few items scream colonialism more than the Parthenon Marbles (often called the Elgin Marbles). Their only defence is they weren’t the only ones: the Pergamon in Berlin or the Louvre in Paris can be seen as similar cultural crime scenes.

[ Mark Paul: It may be the British Museum, but it’s the rest of the world’s clobber ]

If the British Museum – which I love – represents Victorian Britain’s global footprint, what is the modern equivalent? What institution represents 21st-century Britain, or at least England? It has to be England’s most dynamic cultural export of the past 30 years, the English Premier League. It is a global brand, followed and obsessed over by millions across the world, uniting strangers in their devotion to teams that many years ago stopped drawing footballers from their specific hinterland. Players in Premier League teams have little connection to the cities that their team comes from and their fan base is increasingly cosmopolitan. The truly global nature of the Premier League came home to me a few months ago when in I was in Las Vegas to see Ireland’s most popular cultural export of the past three decades, U2. The Jamaican taxi driver had been in the States for years, and only........

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