a crap argument... and they write to me and say - 'What about if all museums had to give back all their stuff!' This was a wildly dogmatic, radical position: irrational, unexamined, intolerant and they wouldn't give you credit for having tried to deal with their case in advance.

"And so I thought, right, that means I'm onto something. It certainly means we will win the argument because people on the other side aren't trying to argue, all they're saying is 'Ya, ya, ya, ya, we've got them and you can't make us take them back!'"

Twenty-five years on, however, the argument is still not won, and there remain those who argue that if Lord Elgin hadn't removed the marbles, they'd have been destroyed or lost. And so, they argue, he did the right thing. Hitchens still maintains Elgin had no right to take them and the British should be impelled to return them. "We can't live with this embarrassment." And he's surprised the Greeks aren't ruder about it.

"Even if they say 'Thank you, you rescued our property from the fire next door, you looked after it while our house burnt down,

the fire was our fault'... that doesn't mean we own the stuff. You wouldn't put up with anyone saying 'Oh well, yeah, thanks I guess I did look after it - in fact it's mine now.'"

When Mercouri died in 1994, Hitchens was one of those who walked in her funeral cortege. He still feels sad Mercouri didn't live to see the marbles returned - but sadder still that her husband, filmmaker Jules Dassin, died in March this year before he could see the official opening of the New Acropolis Museum. "That was a feasible desire. We - he and I - could've been there."

Hitchens is adamant that the campaign that Mercouri began will never be abandoned. "As Rabbi Hillel the great Babylonian Rabbi said, 'You may not ever see the victory of the justice but you have no right to abandon the struggle for it.'" He likes to imagine the day the marbles are returned: "Here's the day: the day's come, British PM arrives, the ship arrives at Piraeus, the ceremony's begun, there are fireworks... Who can think about that and not want it to happen?"